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2011
Of trUction eraNts: On Benito Mussolini and Ezra
Pound
Andrew Durbin
Bard College
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Durbin, Andrew, "Of trUction eraNts: On Benito Mussolini and Ezra Pound" (2011). Senior Projects Fall 2011. Paper 22.
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Of trUction eraNts:
On Benito Mussolini and Ezra Pound
Senior Project submitted to
The Division of Languages and Literature
of Bard College
by
Andrew Durbin
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
November 2011
My study of Pound, Mussolini, and the Classics wouldn’t have been possible without the
unshakeable support of my advisor, Benjamin Stevens. Throughout this project he pushed
me to explore, interrogate, and think through this history and poetics in ways I couldn’t
have done alone. He, more than any other professor at Bard, has supported all of my
academic and extra-curricular endeavors, and for that I owe him many, many thanks. I
would also like to thank the entire Classics department, but especially Carolyn Dewald
and Bill Mullen, for always allowing me to do what I do, whatever that is.
The title of my senior project is from a line of Jackson Mac Low’s procedural erasure of
the Cantos, Words nd Ends for Ez, a book I discuss in the last chapter. Mac Low’s chance
procedure erased the original meaning (and shape) of Pound’s words, leaving only
fragments unloosed from their parent word and forced to hug the left-margin. I chose this
title precisely because the two key words in it lack any obvious meaning, because they
only make sense when the reader’s imagination attempts to restore them to their original
sense-context. Guesswork. I like that “truction” suggests both “destruction” and
“construction,” but also the sonic elision of “of structon” into “obstruction.” Anyone
who’s read Pound before understands the associations. “Erants” suggests both “errancy”
and “errantry.” Erring Ezra, Ezra-Errant, nds of construction or destruction. All these
possibilities in quasi-etymologies, ghosts of words haunting their original text. They ask
that you put them back. I want to try.
Mr. Owen Young made a mistake, he said the only thing he wished his son to have was
the power of clearly expressing his ideas. Not at all. It is not clarity that is desirable but
force.
—Gertrude Stein, Henry James
Contents
A poetics……………………………………………………………………………......…5
I. A Difficult Fusion………………………….……………………………………………7
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext……………………………………..21
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound………………..……………………...60
IV. Ez nd Ends…………………………………………………………………………...95
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………111
List of Figures……...…………………………………………………………………...115
A Poetics Durbin 5
(Figure 1)
Where does Rome go after Rome? It’s almost like the lyric of a song, only one none of us
would ever think to sing. Renovations begin when the building falls into disrepair, or
when those who live inside the building decide that the building must not fall into
disrepair. Some of us are living in Europe. There are many ruins around us, and they
remind us of ourselves when we were not around to see them before they needed
renovation. It is 1922. Can you tell me the difference between then and now? I sit in my
room staring at my computer screen, reading about how, in the most recent presidential
debate, the candidates discussed whether or not the government should be allowed to
mandate life-saving vaccinations. The debate is not about preventive medicine. It is not
1922 because that would be saying too much. Perhaps it is 1921. I have just written a
poem about myself and it ends with the lines, “This is how narratives build, / and this is
A Poetics Durbin 6
exactly how they built me.” Sometimes it is obvious that things never change, other times
it is obvious that they are only ever changing. You can’t step into the same river once, let
alone twice. Is that what we mean? It is 2011. I sit in my room staring at my computer
screen, and write the following sentence: “She gets up, moves to the front of the theater
to get a better view, and sits down.” She did not mean to go to the movies to see her lover
on the screen, and yet there he is—the new prime minister of Italy. What name would
you give him? I have just written a poem about you and it ends with the line, “History
repeats itself and asks for your money.” There are always questions, and they knock on
my door: Have you finished, and if so, have you finished as you’d planned? Tomorrow
morning it will be winter. What is the state of Europe? Ezra Pound writes his poem on
toilet paper, and some people sympathize with him. I am trying to sympathize with him.
Many of his friends are dead, including those who knew him best. Yes, they are alive and
can have those colors. Yesterday I got up, went out for coffee, and came back to read
Jackson Mac Low. I can’t read Jackson Mac Low. My friend Paul is trying to reconstruct
the Cantos using only the references parsed in Terrell’s Companion to the Cantos of Ezra
Pound. He calls it translation. It is hard for me to tell him that I can’t read his poems
because I feel “too close” to their ostensible subject, though I recognize that the one titled
“Enter the Void” is OK. There aren’t any clouds in the sky today. The river generally
flows from north to south. There is a portrait of Mussolini in one of my notebooks. It is
1883. The first hydroelectric plant has opened in Italy. This is what we might call the
beginning, unless you remember that the beginning always begins with Rome. It is easy
to travel up the Via Nazionale in the coffin of Anita Garibaldi. It is not easy to get out.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 7
I
A Difficult Fusion
Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (2009)—a film about Benito Mussolini’s little-
known mistress (and possible additional wife), Ida Dalser and her eventual death in a
mental institution—has received an averaged score of 92% among critics on Rotten
Tomatoes, a movie database that aggregates a wide-range of movie reviews throughout
the United States and England.
1
Tom Long of the Detroit News writes in his
representative review that the film is “a passionate, bold look at power, paranoia and
betrayal in a little-known corner of history[.] Vincere is steamy, sad and so Italian it feels
like an opera.” While praise among English-language critics has been generally very
good, many have qualified their praise of the film. Jonathan Richards, a contributor to
Film.com, writes in his full review (complete reviews are hyperlinked on the site) that the
movie “is a wild ride of a movie, operatic in theme and style, sometimes flamboyant,
often murky, occasionally vaulting ecstatically into camp, and more than occasionally
turning incomprehensible as it scatters time frames and shuffles reality and illusion.”
Incoherence of style. is one of the most common criticisms made by critics of the film.
Jonathan Kiefer of the Sacramento News & Review writes, “It’s all a grand and flashy
affair—but also weirdly prone to the incoherence, redundancy and bullying
dehumanization that characterized the political history it presumes to critique.” The
apparent “incoherence” of the plot is probably due to its subtle shifts in time and imagery,
which Bellocchio achieves by splicing in newsreels from the 1920s and 30s. Neither
Rotten Tomatoes nor Metacritic (a similar website) account for Italian reviews of the
1
Among users of the site, the film has received a 61%.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 8
film, but enthusiasm for the film in continental Europe and Italy has been somewhat
similar to that in the U.S. In La Stampa, critic Lietta Tornabuoni praises the film for its
dynamic style and the actors’ performances: “un gran film diverso da tutti, innovativo,
dinamico, affascinante.” Although Gabriella Gallozi, writing in Unit, refers to the film’s
attempt to bridge its own images with historical footage as “una difficoltosa fusione,” she
does praise the film’s cinematographic and emotional complexities. Vincere was featured
at the 2009 Cannes film festival and was nominated for the Palme d’Or, which it didn’t
win. That award went to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009), a film that deals
with the late adolescence of the generation that would fight in the Second World War.
While Vincere isn’t a very impressive film, it makes some incidentally provocative points
on the problems of representing a figure like Mussolini, problems which were present
even in his contemporary moment.
Vincere is “weirdly prone to incoherence” for a number of reasons, few of which
the film seems to fully understand. While most critics were bothered by the confusing
elision of styles, especially of realism and opera, as well as its unclear commitment to
linear narrative (for the most part its arc is linear, only to occasionally dip into the past),
virtually no one has commented on the problem representation of Mussolini poses in the
first place. Most critics offered praise for Giovanna Mezzogiorno’s performance as Ida
Dalser,
2
but remained fairly silent on Filippo Timi’s role as both Mussolini and
Mussolini’s son with Dalser.
3
This is an interesting omission because the central problem
of the film for meseems to be Timi’s role as Mussolini and his son, and what it ultimately
2
She was considered for the Prix d'interprétation feminine, but the award went to
Charlotte Gainsbourg for her performance in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.
3
Half way through the film Timi-Mussolini is replaced by newsreel footage of Il Duce.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 9
says about fictionalizing Mussolini. But there are a number of factors that might explain
this silence on the part of critics. For one, Timi looks nothing like Mussolini: his body
doesn’t match the dictator’s Napoleonic squareness nor does his face look anything like
Mussolini’s iconic one. Timi lacks the geometric symmetry and the physical robustness
of Mussolini’s features that made the image of Il Duce such an immediate, potent symbol
of Italian power—and Modernity. The sculptural quality of Mussolini’s features, which
simultaneously referenced the post-war art of the Italian avant-garde and its busy revival
of classicism as well as classical images of Roman emperors, and visually reinforced the
strength of Italy by providing a singular, physical analog to the country’s imperialist
ambitions. All of the referential qualities were articulated by fascist propaganda, and
were used to ensure Mussolini’s ubiquitous presence as political and cultural leader,
much like the Roman emperors he partially modeled his dictatorship after, especially
Caesar Augustus. For example, in conquered North Africa, the fascists carved a large
bust of Mussolini’s face in Algeria, suggesting not only his importance as the head of
Italian government (Il Capo, as Pound calls him in the Pisan Cantos), but also the
imagistic power of his features.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 10
Timi’s face is one of the crucial flaws in the film’s representation of Mussolini, one that
it complicates by replacing him half-way through the film with newsreel footage of
Mussolini. From thereon, documentary footage functions to represent the character of
Mussolini in the film. (At one point a crowd even “reacts” to the footage as though he
were there.) The film seems to hope that this stylistic decision will enact on screen the
historical transformation of Mussolini from the socialist to the militaristic nationalist by
replacing the Timi of softer, Technicolor features with the historic black and white
footage of the real Mussolini.
(Figure 2)
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 11
(Figure 3)
While this may be one part of the film’s point, the move is dissonant, and renders its
representative attempts somewhat flaccid. Instead of underscoring the powerful shift in
Mussolini, it draws attention to (through the contrast of original with documentary
footage) the inability of the film to portray Mussolini in as effective a manner as the
original footage does.
4
The operatic quality of the film underscores its own fictiveness in
trying to assimilate the documentary. The images of Mussolini easily overpower Timi,
and not only because they benefit from historical, non-fictive veracity, but because
Mussolini’s performance of himself is simply more captivating than Timi’s, who lacks
the simultaneous control and effortlessness of the real Il Duce. Mussolini’s physical
theatricality, which draws hyper-consciously on the popular images of national heroes (of
the Risorgimento and earlier), Roman emperors, and an Italian popular culture that he
was in part defining,
5
is simply beyond Timi’s abilities to replicate. Timi refers only to a
limited set of stereotyped behavioral ticks (the jutting chin, the clenched fists, the
4
By effective I don’t necessarily mean an “exact,” “historically accurate” performance
by an actor who looks identical to Mussolini, I mean rather an approach to this moment
in history, to the development of fascism, that fully addresses the psychological,
historical, and cultural realities that produced the conditions of the World War II. In this
sense, Haneke’s film, though it takes place before World War I, is a much more accurate
portrait of fascism’s career in power because its nuanced, psychological analysis of the
adolescence of those who would be responsible for the war doesn’t seek to imitate the
historical realities as such, but to approximate their conditions. This is a tricky argument
to make, especially with such limited space, but I hope that my paper’s exploration of the
complexities of Mussolini underscores my point that a direct, Hollywood-oriented
biographical representation of him is inadequate.
5
A defining that, as a series of massive, multi-valiant cultural acts carried out across
numerous media, generated what the historian Marla Stone refers to as the “hyperbolic
iconography” (209) of the fascist treatment of history, and in turn influenced much of
Mussolini’s performative readings of history. Stone also writes that what began as a
rhetorical strategy for legitimizing the fascist program into the national history quickly
transformed into an overwhelming kitsch—of art, architecture, film, and parades—by the
end of the fascist era.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 12
operatic aggression), and in this sense, Timi performs a performance, whereas Mussolini
simply performs.
6
More importantly, Bellocchio’s attempt to exploit the interplay
between his film’s own fictiveness and its use of documentary footage falls flat: the mix
of styles, the confusion of linear narrative, the literal play of shadows and light is so
overly cinematic that it is more or less rendered comical, its fictiveness is exposed in the
face of the real Mussolini, who is not only himself—historical and “real”—but a self
more adept at the use of these techniques than the film is. Mussolini is already a more
coherent interplay between modes of representation and discourse than the film, and the
film’s attempt to flatten him out ruptures the power of its own narrative. It is unable to
sustain itself as a coherent fiction, as a biographical, mostly realist “true” portrait of
Mussolini, because in its occasional attempts to de-fictionalize itself (and/or edge toward
the non-fictional) through the use of documentary footage it only draws the viewer’s
attention to the curious inadequacy of the film to realize its own project. Bellocchio seeks
to reinforce the quality of the “horror” and “revulsion” one feels at watching Mussolini
emotionally torture Dalser and rise to power because it happened. But precisely because
it happened, and because the film makes so much of the reality of its subject by way of
the subject himself, Vincere seems so curiously impotent. It remains just a movie,
whereas Mussolini remains, always, an historical fact, a fact in the lives of millions of
individuals.
6
It might be more helpful to think of the two performances as readings. Timi reads the
image of Mussolini and performs it, while Mussolini reads the “historic imaginary” of
Italy (in Claudio Fogu’s terms) in order to perform it. This is something that my thesis
will touch on later: Mussolini’s reading of Italian culture, and the ways a performance of
that reading shapes him both politically and culturally.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 13
In one early scene, Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida Dalser sits in a movie theater,
watching newsreel footage of the real Mussolini. The scene takes place shortly after
Mussolini has been asked by King Victor Emmanuel III on 29 October 1922 to form a
new government following the final collapse of the leftist government. After a summer of
deep internal division and brutal pressures from fascist gangs the left collapsed. The rise
of Mussolini and fascism culminated in the famous “March on Rome” on the day of
inauguration as prime minister, finalizing both symbolic and actual fascist rule. The left
lost its popular support, and many leftist activists were jailed, killed, or coerced into
political inactivity (Sprigge 204). In the film, the camera is first trained on Mezzogiorno
as she sits in a dark theater. Within seconds her face is obscured by men who have
suddenly stood up. She gets up, moves to the front of the theater to get a better view, and
sits down. The scene is switched to an angle behind the audience, all of whom have
raised their hands in fascist salute to an unclear black and white film in the background.
The camera returns to Mezzogiorno, who stands and turns around, the camera following
her, to face the audience. Immediately behind her, with the camera pointed up from
somewhere around her waist, looms the enormous movie screen with the film of
Mussolini. In the footage, Mussolini stands in a crowd with King Emmanuel III, though
quickly that film switches to a close-up of Il Duce’s head. Mezzogiorno is overshadowed
in the right-hand corner of the screen while the real Mussolini surveys whatever scene
lies before him. His enormous head and the intensity of his features—especially his
strong jawline, slightly protruding mouth, enormous Roman nose, and deep-set eyes—
stand in stark contrast to Mezzogiorno.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 14
(Figure 4)
The effect of this scene is chilling, as it signals the shift in the medium of Dalser’s
interactions with her lover. She is no longer permitted to see him in a way that would
allow her to touch him, and Fillipo Timi switches from playing Mussolini to Mussolini’s
son, completing the film’s own estrangement from its subject. The film drops the
fictiveness of Timi’s performance as soon as it introduces historical footage of Il Duce.
Vincere forgoes its own authority to perform and interpret history in the face of the
reality it attempts to replicate. But this shift, problematic as it is for the film’s coherency,
isn’t so much a surrender as it is an (incidental/accidental?—it’s unclear) recognition of
the primacy of the image of Mussolini in the first place, the inability of any secondary
source to reproduce it. Perhaps Bellocchio recognizes the complex system of symbols
and meanings that developed around Mussolini and his film’s inability to adequately
contain this multitude of meanings, as Mussolini was essentially programmed to be
irreducible. The ubiquity of his face and the fascist liturgy that enshrined and organized
around him, if only symbolically, essentially restricts access to definition—to the act of
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 15
defining. The films, literature, visual arts, museums, parades, academies, and architecture
of fascist Italy—from before anno uno
7
to Mussolini’s downfall in 1943—created a
matrix of historical references, suggestions, meanings, and gestures around Mussolini,
partially orchestrated by Mussolini himself, so replete with variegated meanings that it
essentially created both an opportunity to select an image of Il Duce and an overly-
complex trap for those who attempted to represent the whole of him. The image of Il
Duce legitimized itself by borrowing from the potent symbolism of the ancient past of
Rome and the nineteenth century popular unification movement, the Risorgimento, a
symbolism that was already predicated on skewed, politically convenient interpretations
in order to quickly normalize both fascism and Mussolini into the national history, and
exclude all outside attempts, like that of non-state endorsed artists, to participate in the
process of interpretation and the manufacture of meaning. Vincere, in its uneasy and
ultimately self-negating use of found footage, raises this question as to what makes
Mussolini such a complex figure, and what that complexity means for any attempt to
categorize him.
Mussolini not only appeared at the intersections of hundreds of meanings, but was
constituted by the intersection itself. While the development of this system of meanings
unfolded across many media, discourses, and locations, its central aesthetic object gained
particular traction in the arts largely because Mussolini so actively sought to make
himself the center of Italian Modernism. As a Modernist-Futurist, he was the platform the
West could use to launch into the mechanized future of F.T. Marinetti (before Marinetti
7
In 1927, the Fascists created a new calendar that identified October 29
th
as the start of
the New Year. Nineteen twenty-two was also renamed year one (Falasca-Zampoi 1). The
various newspapers at the time ran the two measurements of time alongside one another.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 16
became disillusioned by the dictator’s commitment to antiquity
8
). As an image of
Classical power, he was the most substantial bridge to the past for the art critic
Margherita Sarfatti. For Antonio Monti and many other Italians, the renowned curator of
the Museum of Risorgimento in Milan, he was Il Duce taumaturgo—the leader who
would finish the Risorgimento (a narrative seized and reinvented by fascism in the 1920’s
and 30’s) and heal the country after it’s pyrrhic victory in World War I. The difficulty of
representing Mussolini has been treated by a number of Italian filmmakers, especially
Federico Fellini, whose autobiographical films often address the mercurial, but
ubiquitous presence of Mussolini in Italian life. But perhaps the artist who most
significantly “fell for”—and even contributed to—the complex image system that
surrounded Mussolini was the American poet Ezra Pound, who devoted much of his
energies in the 1920’s and 30’s to Italian fascism as a cultural figure, theorist, radio
broadcaster, and poet, especially in his long, refractory poem, The Cantos, which features
Mussolini as one its heroes for much of the first half of the poem. For Ezra Pound he was
the virtuous Confucian leader capable of reorganizing corrupted contemporary society in
an orderly utopia, the anti-thesis to a system of banking and government geared toward
endless war, an analog to Jefferson, and an epic hero with countless historical
antecedents. In a word, the symbolic potency of Mussolini, the field of (as opposed to
individual of) visual and textual discourse that he became, yielded countless significant,
8
Kenneth E. Silver writes in his essay “A More Durable Self:” “Although his bellicose,
nationalist avant-garde movement had much that was congenial to the Fascists,
[Marinetti’s] stance against what he considered Italy’s cult of the past—‘the annoying
memory of Roman greatness,’ as he wrote—condemned Futurism to history”(31).
Generally the Futurists opposed the fascist appropriation of the Rome of antiquity. Emilio
Settimelli dismissed Mussolini’s Roman ambitions as “an act of restoration of
plagiarism” (Settimelli 274). See also the writings of Giuseppe Prezzolini, whose book
Fascism I will return to later.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 17
culturally generative responses—positive, negative, or ambivalent—during the fascist
“moment” and later. And as Bellocchio’s film demonstrates, the question of
representation of Mussolini remains important today, especially in Italy, where politicians
like (recently ousted) prime minister Silvio Berlusconi continue to draw on the
authoritative image of Mussolini in constructing their own.
Many of these artists and thinkers, especially Ezra Pound, found it difficult to
represent Mussolini, to participate in the discourse of power without estranging
themselves from the center of power. In Vincere, from the movie theater scene onward,
Bellucchio mixes his film with the documentary footage: as Benito Albino (Mussolini’s
son), Timi “attends” a rally of Mussolini’s where the dictator screams various invocations
to the power of Italy and its rightful place as successor to the Roman Empire; later Albino
is committed to psychiatric hospital, like his mother, and Bellucchio interweaves images
of Albino imitating his father with those of the actual Mussolini as an attempt to criticize
Mussolini’s public persona as mad, but also as, I think, a comment on the film’s tortured
attempt at representation. Finally, the film ends by returning to the opening scene in
which Dalser watches Mussolini “confront” the authority of God in a public debate in a
small town (Timi isn’t shown). The final shot of the film is of found footage of a bust of
Mussolini being crushed by a machine. The estrangement the film enacts—the
recognition of its failure to provide a Mussolini as powerful as the original (if because of
its fictiveness)—is at the center of Ezra Pound’s relationship to Mussolini in The Cantos,
and his desire to gain access to the symbolic histories and imaginary Mussolini patrolled.
The estrangement is essential to how Pound conceived of Mussolini in his poem, and
perhaps even shaped, re-shaped, and directed the form of the poem, exploded its political,
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 18
philosophical, and poetical concerns beyond what Pound initially conceived in the first
drafts. In this thesis I will trace some of these developments.
The uneven relationship between Pound and Mussolini can be understood, in part,
as an uneven relationship between Pound’s poem and Mussolini’s symbolic self. While it
is popular among Pound critics to separate the man from his poem, and to further parcel
out the fascist from the non-fascist elements, this critical approach creates both an escape
from the ethical quandary of reading, appreciating, and criticizing Pound and distracts
from the dimensionality of the poem. The fascist question in Pound is, for me, a formal
one: to what extent do the Cantos, which take fascist political ideology as at least one
starting point, reflect in their poetics the environment that produced them? To perform a
reading of Pound that recuperates, repudiates, or re-imagines Pound’s fascism as divisible
from other parts of the work or the man says less about Pound than it does about the
reader. In fact, much of the Pound industry (especially in Hugh Kenner and Carroll
Terrell) is about the expiation of Pound’s sins rather than an exploration of them and their
causes. This is also true for readings that simply dismiss him because he was a fascist—a
less common, but nevertheless occasional approach to his work. The critic and Language
poet Bob Perelman, whose book Trouble with Genius was one of the points of origin for
this essay, probably comes close to falling under this category. But the extent to which
Pound’s fascism reflects a formal interest has been underexplored, and I think it is in this
locus, at the intersection of Pound’s historical-poetic-cultural interests with fascism’s,
that we can come to a better understanding of Pound as an individual thinking through a
perceived ethical and historical dilemma, rather than as an as a poet divisible from his
compromised ethics.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 19
Before I draw out the dimensionality of Mussolini in Pound, I want to first
suggest a revision in how I’ve written about Mussolini in the previous paragraphs. For
one, I want to drop any discussion of Mussolini as a “man,” that is, as an individual of
flesh and blood, one with personal, psychological motives (the Mussolini of Bellocchio)
in favor of the Mussolini as the intersection of visual and textual discourse, as a symbolic
imaginary, that he became for his follows and the fascist movement—and for Pound
himself. In a word, I am interested in Il Duce, in a man whose primary presence in his
country’s mind was not as an individual or an individual leader, but as a text, a living
hypertext, a text composed purely of linkages, of reference and gesture to multiple Italian
histories, to both Classical and avant-garde arts, to Augustus as well as the four heroes of
the Risorgimento. This is not to fully discredit the importance of Mussolini’s biography
and its influence on his politics, but to table them as essentially unimportant in their
influence on Pound. What matters for the Cantos is the image of Il Duce, and how Pound
worked from that, however much he claims to “know” Mussolini. The formal principles
that underwrite Pound’s poem—the all inclusive, revision of multiple histories that are
occurring at once—are similar to Il Duce’s, and reflect, in part, Mussolini himself. Like Il
Duce, Pound is primarily interested in the re-interpretation of history in order to construct
a new image of it, to not only include history and its particulars, but to revise it into a
coherent narrative that proposes a better future. Pound places Mussolini at the center of
the first half of his Cantos as one epic hero, and uses the poem to idealize and enact
Giovanni Gentile’s Actualism of making the past “present” in contemporary Italy in
language and poetry. If Il Duce was a living hypertext, then Pound’s Cantos is the textual
analog.
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 20
By conducting much of cultural discourse from the late nineteen-teens to 1943,
from patronage of the arts and museums to the numerous parades and speeches he gave
during his tenure as prime minister, Mussolini as a living hypertext, as Il Duce, enabled
his listeners and viewers to access histories and traditions of their choosing in their
reading of him. For some he was a Futurist symbol of the mechanized future, for others a
Roman emperor. For Pound, he was an epic hero capable of reshaping history, of
enacting the historicist vision of Gentile of a leader who could make action and thought
one. Pound’s poem reflects a similar interest, and I don’t think it’s an accident that the
poem we have was revised from an earlier, somewhat different project after he met the
fascists. It wasn’t until after Pound encountered the fascists that the ambitious, poem
including history began to take shape in Pound’s mind. Nor do I think that Pound’s need
to re-strategize his compositional practice after the Pisan Cantos, when his poem’s living
analog was no longer alive, is an accident. Pound writes in Guide to Kulchur, “The
history of a culture is the history of ideas going into action” (GK 40). I’m interested in the
ways in which Mussolini was, like Pound’s history of a culture, a set of ideas going to
into action, and how that plays out as a formal influence on Pound’s criticism and poems
from the 1920’s to the 40’s. The trace that links them is not tenuous, nor is it obvious,
which is in keeping with Pound’s general elliptical tribute to influence and animus. In the
following chapters, I hope to meditate on fascism, the way it constructed (and
deconstructed) history, transformed Mussolini from a political leader to a cult-literary
object, and how this influenced Pound’s poetics in the Cantos. Through this study, I also
hope to draw some loose, but nevertheless present connections between the ancient past
and its political, cultural, and aesthetic context that so strongly influenced the political
I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 21
and cultural movements of the early 20
th
century. Neither Pound nor Mussolini could
have existed or worked in the world without the Classical tradition to draw on, re-
interpret, and revise.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 22
II
Mussolini Rising:
Reading Il Duce as Hypertext
In order to understand Mussolini as a living hypertext interpenetrated by
numerous cultural, political, and historical discourses, the animus of the political context
that produced him must be first traced back to the early 1880s. It is important to stress the
degree to which Mussolini didn’t emerge out of thin air, but rather arrived at a moment
that was very much the culmination of nearly a century of political strife. Though the
origins of fascism reach farther than the nineteenth century, I am primarily interested in
the immediate history that preceded Italian fascism, because it was the history it directly
responded to, even if many of its philosophical tenants began in Rome. However, the
degree to which this era propagandized itself as a revival of the Rome of antiquity is
important to the way Mussolini and the fascists figured themselves as rulers. In many
ways, this narrative became extremely important in their attempts to normalize fascism in
Italian history, and lead directly to Mussolini’s transcendent status as an intersection of
discourse.
For fascism to rise, socialism had to first decline, a narrative which begins with
the industrialization of Italy at the end of the 19
th
century. While fascist ideology can be
traced well-before the Industrial revolution, the most immediate historical crux that
allowed for the cultural conditions that eventually allowed it to emerge as the dominant
political force in the newly united Italian state can be traced back to the 1880s. Northern
Italy, where the political right was located, rapidly embraced the industrial technologies
and modes of production already popular and successful in Western Europe, starting with
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 23
Milan in 1883 with the opening of the first hydro-electric plant in Italy.
9
The left, based
largely in the south, was sluggish to acclimate to the cultural, financial, and mechanical
transformation of the country, and struggled throughout the nineteen-teens to remain
relevant in national politics, especially as it continued to be relatively rural and artisanal.
By the end of the first decade of the century, the inhabitants of the teeming industrial
cities of the north boasted a 26% increase in wages and shorter work hours while the rest
of the country saw only a 16% rise, broadening the divide between the two halves of the
country. (Forgacs 30-31.)
By 1899, with the opening of the first Fiat plant, and continuing into the first
decade of the twentieth century, northern Italy became a center for automobile
production. Other industries, like steel, sugar, arms, textiles, and banking quickly
industrialized, and in doing so, expanded their influence on Italian culture and politics.
Crucially, the industrialization process tightened the relationship between emergent big
business and the Italian financial system, which in turn increased and broadened the
political activities of many of the major industrialists. Whereas before industrialization
the Italian market was largely localized and independent of major financial structures, the
Italy of the early twentieth-century reorganized production such that it became
increasingly dependent on the state and the rest of Europe. Because the right favored big
business in legislation, these activities leaned mostly to right-wing causes. David Forgacs
writes in his study on Italy during the Industrial era,
The convergences between industry and financed also involved a
tightening of links with the political system. This was both because the
state became involved in the expansion of modern sectors of the economy,
9
It is no accident that Milan, which continued to lead the industrial revolution in Italy,
produced both the Futurists and Mussolini.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 24
given that a large domestic market did not exist, and also because
politicians were linked to particular banks …, particular sectors of
industry…, and the particular economic policy orientations. (31)
The industrialization of other major sectors of Italian life, especially the newspapers,
book publishing, and the theater (as transformed into/by the cinema), also increased the
political activities of the (primarily) right wing industrialists. Unlike the previous political
and financial elite, this new set did not necessarily emerge out of the ruling aristocratic
class, which had been mostly supportive of the socialist rule of Giovanni Giolitti. In fact,
one of the most significant transformations industrialization produced in Italian culture,
and one that had arguably the most immediate impact on the support structures of both
the right and left, was the newspaper industry, an industry that had formerly supported
the socialists.
The influence of industry through newspapers was felt locally at first, but
substantially. By the early part of the century, most papers operated at a loss, facing
“spiraling costs and continued low returns” (Forgacs 24). Seeing an opportunity for
raising public support for industrialization, major industrialists gained considerable
political leverage by financing and revitalizing the local newspapers.
10
By providing
10
The Italian newspaper production and distribution system was largely based on local
efforts, which meant that most papers did not have significant political power outside
their localities. No Italian paper except perhaps Il Corriere della Sera, which underwent
tremendous financial and political renovations at the hands of cotton industrialist
Benigno Crespi, was distributed outside of the city it was produced in. Until the 1980s,
Italian newspapers also had considerably lower subscription rates when compared to
Western Europe and the United States, due in part to low literacy rates. Because of the
small reading public, papers before industrialization made little effort to appeal to
constituencies other than the cultural and political elite. This made them into much more
lucrative investment opportunities for the major industrialists, who saw the papers as the
perfect site for closed-door political activism. See David Forgacs helpful table of the
shareholding interests of the major newspapers [39] to observe the extent to which
industry had controlling interests in the medium.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 25
capital to these struggling papers, industrialists were able to gain considerable control
over editorial policies. Under this modernization and revitalization process of the papers,
the industries expanded their political clout and raised local interest in promoting
industrial interests. Mussolini’s extremely popular and pro-war paper Il Popolo d’Italia,
for example, raised its start capital in part through the efforts of several industrialists who
would have (and did) benefit from the First World War (Forgacs 36), Mussolini started
the paper after he was expelled from the Socialist party, and used it as a platform for
launching his political career as well as the fascist movement. After several papers
reversed their support of the left (most notably Il Resto del Carlino), the socialists opened
an official inquiry into the funding behind several papers in an effort to increase financial
transparency. But this new public light did nothing to slow the political transformation of
the papers. Rather, all efforts to halt the right’s industrial-financial gains only further
stultified support for the left, as most Italians began to see them as opposed to progress
and therefore economic parity with Western Europe. Unlike socialism, “Fascism, despite
ideological contradictions within it as a movement, ultimately appeared to guarantee a
protective political framework for the dominant classes, who therefore transferred their
support of it” (Forgacs 53). Even the lower classes of northern Italy saw increased
benefits under the fascist-support industrialization process, with increased wages and
fewer work hours, thus effecting a similar, widespread political shift in the northern
lower classes. The crippling factory strikes of the late nineteen-teens only further
diminished the appeal of socialism.
The First World War, which the right supported and the left was incapable of
preventing, proved more financially costly and emotionally taxing than anticipated, even
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 26
by those who opposed it in the first place. In domestic politics, confidence in a leftist
government diminished in the fallout of the pyrrhic and somewhat embarrassing victory
of the Italians. Although the left voiced the greatest opposition to the war, it struggled to
“spin” the outcome of the complicated, unsatisfying victory. The right (lead in part by
Mussolini) on the other hand immediately transferred blame for the various humiliations
that accompanied the war on the left, largely through the newspapers. Support for the
socialists among veterans—a crucial and vocal demographic after the war—never
recovered. Mussolini’s successful repackaging of the dramatic defeat at Caporetto as a
result of socialist malfunction could perhaps be seen as the final assurance of the death of
an effective non-fascist or right-wing political framework in Italy until after the Allied
occupation.
The 1917 battle and subsequent defeat at Caporetto, a city that lies along the
northern border of the country, created within Italian national culture a crisis of identity
that lead directly to the ascent of fascism—and Mussolini. The battle was fought between
the allied forces of Germany and Austria-Hungary and the second Italian army, and lasted
from October 24 to November 19 of that year. The German and Austria-Hungarian
offensive was relentless in its use of poison gas, and the second Italian army, already
considerably weakened by previous engagements with the Central Powers, collapsed,
leaving Italy open to a total invasion. Logistical failures on the part of the Central Powers
prevented them from entering Italy, and a war of attrition ensued until they retreated back
to the Piave river, where they were later turned back in the Battle of Vittorio Venetto.
(Clark 223-4.) Regardless of the later success, the battle took on an enormous character in
the Italian popular imagination. Quoting the scholar Elvio Fachinelli, Claudio Fogu, who
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 27
I have found to be one of the most insightful thinkers on the philosophical tenants that
underwrite Italian fascism, argues that this event was fundamental “in the formation and
early mass appeal of fascist ideology,” largely because it was viewed as a failure of
socialism to protect a homeland only recently stitched together after centuries of conflict.
He writes, “[D]uring the three months of retreat that followed the defeat at Caporetto,
there rose an ‘image of an endangered fatherland, dead or under deadly threat,’ which
spread rapidly throughout the home front” (Fogu 44). This image persisted well into the
post-war, and became a defining feature of Italian popular consciousness—and the right
quickly propagandized it as a failure of the left in order to undermine socialist authority
and popularity.
This particular threat—of the loss of a unified Italy—was especially dramatic
after the Risorgimento (the “Resurgence”) of the nineteenth century that had finally
unified Italy. This popular movement, which I’ll return to momentarily, was a source of
considerable national pride, and functioned as a rallying point for most Italians, as many
saw it as a restoration of their culture to its rightful place in Europe. The success of the
Central Powers’ relatively brief offensive threatened to expose old wounds and, more
importantly, to render the century of conflict and pain entirely pointless. This moment
also produced in the populace a desire for a much stronger national defense and
government structure, one that could fend off the threats of its northern neighbors and
compete with them economically. Immediately following the war, Italians began to look
to their own national history and character for the source of this new Italy.
11
While
11
In his Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton lists “a sense of overwhelming crisis
beyond the reach of any traditional solutions” as the first of his “mobilizing passions”
beyond fascist movements (Paxton 41). And indeed, no traditional solution was the fix
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 28
victory enabled Italy to cling to some hope that this was possible, victory alone could not
to assuage the public fear that Italy was unprotected and exposed. As the fascists (and
their predecessors, the Futurists) believed, Italy would require an ideological and cultural
shift in order to secure its national borders and, by extension, its culture. The war
produced a need for a new philosophy of history and a new kind of Italian leader.
Mussolini, who was both politically agile and conscious of the cultural vulnerabilities
that emerged in the public space after the war, would eventually emerge as this new
leader, Il Duce—Futurist, philosopher, Roman emperor, artist, work of art, hypertext: a
figure not only representative of the power of the state, but of its culture. A figure around
which culture could swarm, and re-orient itself. For a country recently made vulnerable
by a newly mechanized Europe, Mussolini was a blank slate upon which they could write
any hope for a stronger Italy. Adrian Lyttelton writes in his essay “Italian Fascism,”
[Mussolini’s] complex and contradictory personality, and his instability of
aim allowed a variety of different groups to project their hopes upon him[,
even though he] had little capacity for long-range planning, and for all his
brilliance as a political tactician in the really serious crises of his political
career, he often proved himself hesitant and vacillating. (147).
While I wouldn’t necessarily characterize Mussolini’s actions as “vacillating,” a word
which suggests too much accidence and indecisiveness, I would argue that his actions
could be seen as “oscillating,” a verb that seems to suggest more, though still limited
agency. As a figure in Italian politics, Mussolini consciously oscillated between actions
in order to appear as so much to so manyat once. In this regard, the Italian people and
those who supported him, like Pound, could graph their various political ideologies and
precisely because the traditional solution—a unified Italy—was itself at the center of the
crisis. Instead, Italians sought a blend of the new, the Modernist, and the old, the
classical.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 29
interests onto his, and even ascribe to him any number of motives. Mussolini realized this
in part through a conscious activation of certain histories within Italy. But before Il Duce
could emerge, a philosophical groundwork had to be set in place.
(Figure 5. Mussolini speaks to a crowd)
In response to the historian Benedetto Croce, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile
proposed a philosophical program of historiography that would prove especially
attractive to the fascists and Mussolini at this time: that history can be retrieved from the
past and made “present.” For Gentile, any act can potentially be invested with a historical
character, can have consequences such that history is re-oriented toward it, made actual
in the present—a philosophical wager he called Actualism.
12
As Claudio Fogu writes in
his book The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy,
12
There are echoes of this kind of thinking in T.S. Eliot’s near-contemporary essay,
“Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Focusing on the way the present can be used to re-
orient history, Eliot argues a somewhat similar view of literary history. Eliot writes, “The
existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is
complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 30
From the point of view of [A]ctualism, reading a history book, a historical
document, or a historic event were all activities belonging to the
transtemporal presence of experience. Because we can never transport
ourselves to the past, we can always make that pas attuale (actual) by
thinking its content within ‘our present awareness of thinking ourselves
thinking the object.’ (38)
In his Actualist manifesto, Gentile includes the central maxim of the intellectual
movement: “L’atto del pensare come atto puro”—the act of thinking as a pure act.
Gentile’s philosophy was primarily interested in the translation of thought into action
through reading, a theory he later revised to include engagement with the performance or
spectacle of history—a tacit sanction of Mussolini’s public performance of the histories
of Rome in his various commemorations, speeches, and parades. In his book Fascism,
Giuseppe Prezzolini, an Italian writer who lived through the period, quotes from some of
Gentile’s writings on Actualism written after the March on Rome, a period which
privileges a mystical presence of history in the subject: “Let us quit the books, then, and
consider the spirit of the deeds which throughout history have meant so much more to us
than any expounded doctrines” (F 99). For Gentile, historical consciousness could be
“performed” publically. Further clarifying Gentile’s position on history, Fogu writes,
Actualism [is] the syntactical subjectification of objects, or the semantic
contamination of philosophical and religious language, or the translation
of rhetorical analogy into catastrophe, or the grammatical activation of
select nouns into predicates: from ‘fact’ to ‘acting,’ from ‘philosophy’ to
‘filosofare’ (to do philosophy). At the root of the [A]ctualist imaginary we
novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations,
proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is
conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the
form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should
be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (38). Because of
the importance of this essay to the development of literary Modernism, and the possible
influence Pound had on Eliot’s thinking, I will return to a discussion of this passage and
others in the next chapter.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 31
thus find the quintessentially modernist utopia of a self-generating actant
(Fogu 46).
Actualism was a phenomenon in historiography that pretended to have real-world
consequences. With Actualism, Gentile responded to the emergence of both Futurism,
with its call for Europe to embrace the technologies of war as an avenue to the future, as
well as the ancient past. Gentile, like other fascists, saw in Italian culture an enormous
discontinuity between Rome and contemporary Italy, and he attempted to straddle the
dividing line between the Futurists and Rome by developing a historiography (and
eventually a cultural) practice that could resuscitate Rome and transport it to the fascist
moment. For Gentile, Fogu writes, the moment of reading acts as site for the absorption
of historical particulars that could reshape and reorient one to the other, enacting at that
moment a shift within the subject that enables him/her to bring history within them,
dissolving “the medium of representation between thinking and writing into a historical
self-generation” (39). This, in turns, creates subjects who are thinking about their daily
life in a fascist context in terms of a transcendent history, like that of ancient Rome,
creating for Mussolini a convenient space to define much of his government’s actions in
terms of the Roman Empire. This philosophy of history was also a more generally
convenient tool for fascism because it proposed a philosophical and historicizing praxis
that could be used to normalize fascism in Italian history through its public spectacles.
According to Gentile’s Actualism, fascism’s performance of its power was generated out
of history itself, and therefore “more legitimate” than the left, which over-relied on
contemporary (and therefore transient), self-interested in politics.
The somewhat hidden, but crucial relationship between Gentile’s Actualism and
Mussolini’s fascism is especially obvious in the image of the two provided by the Italian
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 32
Encyclopedia, which was complied by fascist intellectuals in 1932. The entry on
“Fascism” was signed by Mussolini (and was later expanded “by” Mussolini as an essay
titled “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism”), but it was written by Gentile. The
entry is arguably the most important of his writings because it reveals the way in which
power (=Mussolini) appropriated Actualism in its self-definition for a large, public
audience. Central to this fiction was fascism’s own mythos, and the way it used that
mythos to construct itself as a fundamentally Italian political phenomenon. Fascism was
not exclusively the culmination of an intellectual tradition, rather it was a tradition
(extending back to Rome) inherent in the Italian political system. Fascism was always
there, it only needed to be fully realized by Mussolini and his allies. In fact, for the
fascists fascism was never an ideology, rather it was a political system more directly
related to reality than any other before it. Gentile writes in the entry, “Fascism was not
the nursling of a doctrine worked out beforehand with detailed elaboration; it was born of
the need for action and it was itself from the beginning practical rather than theoretical”
(Gentile 288). Like the Risorgimento and Rome, which were Italian “moments” rather
than ideologies (or, in the least, so large and wide-ranging as to be seen as beyond
ideology), fascism was the next phase of Italian history, one so important that it required
a reset of the calendar. In the 1930s, the Italians adopted a new calendar. While it was
semi-optional (most newspapers chose to run the date beside the Gregorian calendar, and
many private citizens (including Ezra Pound on occasion) used the date in their letters.
The new system remained in place until 1943.
Gentile was one of the leading thinkers at the time, and his suggestion that
Rome—the ultimate and most potent symbol of Italian strength—could be brought into
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 33
modernity was aimed precisely at inviting fascist appropriation of his ideas, especially as
Mussolini and the fascists began to participate in the broad culture of Classicism that
attended European Modernism. For Gentile, Rome was a symbol of pure action, one that
could be integrated into the fascist image after the war and used for political leverage
against the left. The end of the war, and the decline of the left, became the perfect outlet
for massive political and intellectual change in Italy. Fogu writes, “Quite literally, Gentile
read the Italian victory in the Great War as the historical sign of a collective reorientation
of the historical imagination toward history belonging to the present” (Fogu 42). But as
far as a larger philosophical project, one that could be developed within media across the
spectrum of Italian culture, Gentile and the fascists were only interested in select
histories, specifically that of Rome of the Caesars and the Risorgimento, and even more
specifically in their own selective readings of history. For the emergent fascist
movement, the negotiation of these two symbolic, overlapping histories of the Italian
state was central to broadening the appeal of their movement, and for transforming
Mussolini from politician into the central junction in culture at which the numerous
symbols, histories, and images of the Italy of the past and present were attached,
manipulated, reinterpreted, assaulted, redefined, and remade. While an enormous amount
of agency can be ascribed to Mussolini, his ability to emerge as a living hypertext, as
someone with such a central, privileged access to power, its representation, and its ability
to represent, was largely due to the extent to which Italian culture was frayed and
destabilized by the war, and the left’s political fortunes ruined by industrialization.
While ascent can be credited in part to Mussolini’s negotiation of the Italian
imaginary through an Actualist mode of historiography (and historical engagement),
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 34
especially in the wake of the postwar, the conditions of the fascist rise were not entirely
grounded in philosophical discontent. The rise of Italian fascism in both political and
national life was extremely quick, especially once a figure capable of uniting its different,
widespread, and at times contradictory factions—Mussolini, Il Duce—emerged. The
fascist movement gained traction as a quasi-national movement at the end of the
nineteen-teens when Mussolini militarized his supporters (Paxton 58) in the face of
ongoing socialist workers strikes, though its influence was still predominately limited to
the industrialized north. Although most of the fascist gains that were made at the expense
of the socialists came out of a brutal ethic of intimidation, their ability to cripple the
socialist apparatus was certainly helped by their clever manipulation of history following
the war. The permanence of the fascist political capital was insured by their interest in the
narrative of their movement and its place in Italian history, and Mussolini took an active
role in narrating his political achievements as a necessary next step in Italian history. In
fact, central to the fascist revolution was the revolution in narrative, one that rewrote
much of the history that preceded it.
The trauma of war produced in Italian culture a widespread desire for a new
leadership that could “heal” its wounds—and for, as was made explicit in much of the
propaganda at the time, a pharmacon to fix Italy. The future curator of the Museum of the
Risorgimento in Milan, one of the most important sites for reconciling the fascist present
with the Risorgimento past, Antonio Monti, first expressed this “collective expectations”
in April 1920, when he anonymously wrote an article, “Museums of Suffering,” calling
for anti-war “museums of suffering” to commemorate the war dead (Fogu 52). This
article was about a scarred war veteran boarding a tram car, and the subsequent bourgeois
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 35
disgust at his appearance. While no such museums were ever constructed, the scope of
the Museum of the Risorgimento was expanded (after much internal debate) to include
the First World War. Monti’s curatorship at the Risorgimento Museum crucially elevated
his place in the construction of the fascist narrative, and instantly made him an asset to
the fascist party. In his curatorship, Monti was responsible for (re)constructing (through
various exhibits) the Risorgimento for popular consumption, and was extremely
important in presenting fascism as an extension of the unification movement. This
involved exhibits, the arrangement and collection of material, the establishment of the
criteria for what constitutes an artifact of Risorgimento history, and documents detailing
the history of the movement—and, operating after Gentile, this collection stressed the
presentness of history, focusing on personal documents to chronicle the 19
th
century that
were familiar and tactile. The narrative was mostly told through soldiers’ letters and
small, personal objects. As one of the nation’s authority on the Risorgimento, Monti’s
support of Mussolini was crucial—and helped to initiate his transformation into icon,
hero, and centerpiece of the Italian imaginary. In 1930 Monti revised the image of the
wounded veteran in a second open letter to include the very pharmacon the country had
been seeking: Mussolini. In the (signed) article, “Mussolini’s Caress to the War
Archive,” the wounded veteran is no longer the object of scorn, but rather the subject of
Mussolini’s loving and healing caress during his 1923 visit to Milan as prime minister
(Fogu 53). The soldiers weeps tears of gratitude. This image is especially important
because it stresses the degree to which a focus on the renewal of Italian life became a
focus on Mussolini, and the extent to which that focus was transformed by, and
transformed, Il Duce.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 36
This first Mussolini, Il Duce taumaturgo, as Fogu describes him, appealed so
firstly because it “foregrounds the crucial role that Catholic imagery played in encoding
these expectations” in the great healer in Italy.
13
More importantly, Il Duce taumaturgo
became a salient image that “pointed explicitly to the founding interaction between the
formation of fascist historic imaginary and the popular cult of Mussolini.” This Mussolini
was newly resilient, an image of resistance against the forces opposed to Italy and to its
own inner weaknesses. The left, led by Giolitti, was incapable of producing a figure of
similar mass appeal who could also successively generate the symbolic linkages between
the various factors of Italian life required in the post-war. Giolitti and the socialists
appeared slow, resistant to change, or worse, opposed to it, and therefore to a strong Italy.
(Fogu 54-55.) They also lacked the charisma that was so essential to Mussolini’s appeal.
In fact, the most significant opposition Mussolini faced came from within the fascist
movement itself. Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was initially much more famous than
Mussolini, and had a wider support base in the party. But D’Annunzio, who was known
for his decadence, lyric poetry, and dandyism, was easily branded as too-nineteenth
century to lead a post-war Italy. After flubbing the occupation at Fiume, D’Annunzio
quickly lost the support of both the fascists and of Giolitti’s government. After 1922,
when he was pushed from a window in an apparent assassination attempt, D’Annunzio’s
retired from politics to Vittoriale, near Salò, where he continued to write poetry until his
death in 1938 (Bosworth 146).
13
Until the mid-1920s, the Catholic Church was reluctant to participate in fascism on an
official level (though most Catholic publications had already backed Mussolini and the
fascists, seeing, in part, the potential for him as a figure of reconciliation in the aftermath
of the war). However, by 1926 Church officials realigned the church to the fascist state,
maintaining a complicit relationship with Mussolini until the collapse of his regime. Of
course, within the Church structure there was a tremendous amount of dissent.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 37
After D’Annunzio’s political fortunes were ruined nationally and within the
fascist movement, Mussolini emerged unopposed as a national figure capable of healing
the wounds of a hemorrhaging Italy. In 1920 and 1921, Mussolini and the fascists quickly
consolidated their power and began to spread across Italy. In the Po valley, Tuscany, and
Umbria, Mussolini’s socialist rivals unsuccessfully occupied a number of factories in
protest for better working conditions. Their inability to secure popular support made
socialists vulnerable to fascist takeovers in local governments. This shift was most
dramatic in Ferrara and Bologna, once-centers of northern socialism with enormous
union member counts.
14
However, as Bosworth writes, the workers were “poorly
instructed in union principles and practices” (150), and therefore prone to rifts, especially
in the wake of the failed factory takeovers. These internal divisions fractured the
movement and made them particularly susceptible to fascist intimidations—and to the
local propaganda machines, like the newspapers. By 1921 socialist power in the Po
collapsed in the wake of violent fascist antagonisms, and was replaced immediately by
local fascist governments and unions. With the fascist political union apparatus in place,
its most ambitious leader, Italo Balbo, began to encourage squads to march on cities north
of Ferrara, to Ravenna (where they assembled at a statue of Dante) and Venice. Balbo
would later become second to Mussolini as the Commander-in-Chief of Italian Africa
until 1940, when Italians mistook his plane for a British one and shot him down over
Tobruk, Libya.
15
These marches successfully turned back any socialist or leftist dissent.
14
“In August 1920, [the union] Federterra claimed 74,000 members in Ferrara province
alone, the highest tally in Italy (Bologna came next with 73,000)” (Bosworth 150).
15
In an obituary in their 22 July 1940 issue, Life magazine un-ironically referred to Balbo
as “the best type of Italian adventurer.”
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 38
Internal divisions in Giovanni Giolitti’s coalition government led to its collapse in
June 1921. By July, Mussolini renounced fascist violence, writing in a party paper that
recent converts had misinterpreted the political program as “based on violence in order to
be violent” (Bosworth 158). In his article, Mussolini also made explicit his opposition to
anti-Semitism, a pronounced point of disagreement between the Italian fascists and the
German National Socialists that would later take on greater weight and urgency when the
Nazis started to push for the Italian fascists to deport its Jews.
16
Mussolini made
agreements with the weakened (but, by the inertia of the state, technically still in power)
socialists, adopting a conciliatory and moderate tone in his writings. However, Mussolini
remilitarized his position in December, calling for a “military-style review” (Bosworth
162) of the roving gangs in order to strengthen their effectiveness. Mussolini had become
increasingly dissatisfied with the “agrarian slavery” fascism had come to mean (Paxton
62), and pushed for expansion into urban areas—with Rome as the ultimate end-point.
Within the party, there was still some reluctance to full embrace urbanity, which meant
an assimilation of the high cultural apparatuses of the cities that Mussolini found so
appealing. In fact, Antonio Gramsci, one of the most significant Italian philosophers of
the twentieth century (and who was later jailed until the end of his life for his opposition
to Mussolini and the fascists), distinguished by 1921 a difference between “two
16
But Mussolini’s rhetoric did not represent Italian Fascist thinking on the Jews. In the
1920s, the editor of the popular Fascist journal La Vita Italiana, Giovanni Preziosi, ran an
article claiming that British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was of Jewish origin and
that both French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and American President Woodrow
Wilson were complicit in a Jewish “conspiracy” (Feinstein 202). Preziosi also translated
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a fraudulent text purporting to be a Jewish handbook
for global domination that originated in Russia in the early twentieth century—into
Italian.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 39
fascisms”—the agrarian and the urban (Lyttelton 133). Fascism, for Mussolini, had
focused too strongly on renovations of the farm labor systems, and not enough on
national politics. But in the February of the following year, the fascist program spread to
the university system, where the movement was already quite popular, with the
establishment of an administrative body in Bologna that could coordinate student groups
throughout the country (Bosworth 163). The inclusion of students and professors
deepened fascist roots in Italian culture, especially as the university system began to
articulate fascism as more than ideology, but as an emergent, Italian paradigm that could
strengthen and protect the state (Clark 295).
Still, despite how far the fascists reached into Italian culture, their political rule
remained limited to the north. Mussolini’s status as a national figure was checked by the
limitations of his political power, but by early 1922, with Giolitti’s coalition in a
shambles, these limitations seemed increasingly ready to expire, paving the way for his
rise to (and eventual transcendence of) prime minister. By the summer of 1922, following
the collapse of the Italian government and its replacement with a caretaker government,
northern Italy was almost completely fascist, with little to no opposition to violence
against leftists and non-Italians by government police forces. Southern Italy, on the other
hand, was unimpressed by fascist control or politics in the north, and felt largely
unthreatened by Mussolini. However, little opposition to the fascists was mobilized a
national scale, and the fascists continued to push for better representation in the
government and did everything in their power to disrupt leftist efforts to form a coalition
government. Their efforts were ultimately successful.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 40
On 22 October King Victor Emmanuel III phoned Mussolini to invite him to form
a coalition government, which he promptly agreed to do (Bosworth 168). That evening
Mussolini boarded an 8:30 train to Rome. He arrived fourteen hours later, and “marched”
on Rome with the 300,000 militarized fascists who had been camped one hundred miles
outside the city. As the Italian historian Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi has written on this
moment in his Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy,
Mussolini’s ascent to Prime Minister was, despite its vague democratic appearances, a
coup, realized through years of endless intimidation of democratic forces by both
physical and non-physical means. Not only did the fascist gangs harm the socialists by
targeting them and their families, they also engaged in a propaganda war that remade the
left into a “faceless” body of usurpers who should be purged from Italian politics so that
the “real” Italians (read the fascists) could emerge to lead. In his new government,
Mussolini was not only prime minister, but also the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the
Minister of the Interior. This third role fortified Mussolini’s position as de-facto military
and police commander of the state. Bosworth writes that Mussolini as Interior Minister,
controlled the most significant zones of national governance, the funds
separate from any budget, the access to telephone taps, the ability to act
covertly. Except from 1924 to 1926 and during the Salò Republic,
Mussolini retained this ministry throughout his regime. (177)
From 1922 to 1943, Mussolini’s rule went largely uninterrupted, and was secured by
endless intimidation of dissent elements, control of the Church, and a cultural and
philosophical program that placed Mussolini at the center of Italian life. The fascist
project remained the dominant, totalizing cultural, political, and historical force in Italian
life, and it extended its rule and influence in nearly all media, but perhaps most
noticeably in the arts. The rapid ascent of the fascists, and the consequential vice-grip
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 41
they were able to keep around Italy, was achieved through the control of the two central
narratives underlying Italian life in the early twentieth-century: the Risorgimento and the
Rome of the Caesars.
The Risorgimento was the first of these Italian narratives that the fascists co-opted
into their own. This movement lasted throughout most of the 19
th
century, and saw the
unification of Italy through a number of violent struggles, culminating in the Franco-
Prussian War, though the unification was completed during World War I with the
annexation of Trieste and Trento. The Risorgimento gave birth to four central figures that
became enormously powerful in the Italian imaginary by the late nineteenth century:
Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel, Camillo Benso, and Giuseppe Mazzini. For the
fascists, Garibaldi was the essential hero of the Risorgimento, in part because he stifled
the Republicanism of Mazzini when he swore his allegiance to the king in a brief letter
that read, “I obey.” The allegiance was of interest to the fascists only because it
correlated somewhat to their allegiance to Emmanuel’s grandson, the king of Italy, and
provided a symbolic commitment that could conceal the illusion of their obedience. In
truth, the king was mostly powerless against Mussolini, and the fascist government
operated independently of him. Mussolini was by far a much more potent symbol of the
power structure, and the cult of personality that attended to him was more widespread
than support for the King. More importantly, Garibaldi’s effortless elision of his military
and political life into a single career that dominated Italy for much of the second half of
the nineteenth century appealed to Mussolini. By the 1920s, assimilation of the
“Garibaldian tradition” became a central effort of the fascist program, especially because
he remained by far the most popular of the Risorgimento heroes, and (for Fogu) was a
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 42
proto-Mussolini figure, part political leader, part mythic hero, part movie star. Adopting
a Garibaldian political mode was crucial to Mussolini’s rise, and he made every effort to
resemble him.
In October 1922, the New York Tribute (glowingly) wondered aloud in its
editorial pages whether Mussolini was the next Garibaldi or Caesar. Nearly a month later,
on 3 November 1922, the New York Herald editorialized that Mussolini was the next
Garibaldi. Other newspapers around the world echoed the sentiment (Falasca-Zamponi
51). Mussolini spent part of the decade attempting to absorb Garibaldi into his own
identity through public declarations of his admiration, self-conscious comparisons
between himself and Garibaldi, and (in a move that finalized the appropriation of
Garibaldi into the image of Mussolini) a ritual celebration surrounding the reburial of his
wife Anita Garibaldi. In the construction of the monument that would be unveiled at her
final resting place after a nineteenth-century style funeral parade, Mussolini engaged in a
thorough “aesthetic policing” that asserted his own reading of the history of Italy,
fascism’s place in it, ultimately celebrating “the symbolic representation of the coming-
into-being of the fascist movement” (Fogu 91).
17
Every detail, from the statue’s artist,
mode of representation (classical over modernist), who was invited to the celebration, to
the two parades (the first in Genoa, the second in Rome) reflected a conscious decision,
designed largely to assert the symbolic authority of Mussolini as a maker of culture.
Mussolini had been using these various ceremonies to construct himself as a bridge
between the contemporary moment and the past. These efforts, as Fogu points out,
17
Mussolini also used the statue as an occasion to articulate the image of the fascist ideal
of the woman. Anita, in the statue, is both a warrior and a mother, clinging to gun and
child. But the scope of this paper prevents me from going further into how Mussolini
reconfigured the ideal woman in the Italian imaginary.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 43
culminated in the second parade in the Anita Garibaldi reburial, in what he calls the
“Roman Apotheosis” of the Anita Garibaldi reburial. This second, more modern parade
stood in sharp contrast to the first, with its somber airs of the nineteenth century. The
Roman parade was, on the contrary, a fascist event like many before it, transforming the
crowds into a single, fascist subject. La Tribuna’s 3 June 1932 issue coverage even
metaphorized the crowds as a single river and a “continuous wave” (Fogu 92) with
Mussolini at its head. With a Gentilean historical consciousness, Mussolini’s Roman
parade,
rather than stressing the symbolic distance between present and past
earlier codified in the Genoese parade [for Anita], the Roman parade was
solely concerned with representing the abolition of this distance in the
development of fascism from ‘movement’ to ‘regime,’ and in the
development of its collective subject from ‘fascist subject’ to ‘fascist mass
subject.’ (Fogu 93)
By the time of the parade, there was never any question, in public or party mind, as to
who was managing this abolition. Mussolini was undoubtedly the symbol of power,
around which Italian culture amassed. The moment was not only a “Roman Apotheosis,”
it was the Risorgimento Apotheosis for Mussolini, ensuring that, in the minds of the
Roman people, he would be linked to the movement as not only an extension of
Garibaldi, but as its fifth hero.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 44
(Figure 6. Mussolini speaking to a crowd in Rome in the late 1930s)
With the Anita Garibaldi event and others like it (including the famous birthday
celebrations for Dante, Virgil, and Rome especially), all of which privileged Mussolini at
their center, Mussolini performed and publicized his reading of history as the dominant
cultural mode. Heather Hyde Minor has written how which Mussolini redesigned Rome
to accommodate his spectacles of fascist power, especially the Via dei Fori Imperiali
which, like the Via Nazionale, were key sites that stood at the “complex interplay of
urban planning, state ceremony, ritual and public art” (Minor 149) that constellated
around Mussolini. The statue of Anita and subsequent cross-country celebration was one
of the first, most dramatic examples of this complex interplay that Mussolini directed and
oriented ultimately toward himself, creating a dualism to every celebration: while
ostensibly each celebration was “for” a particular individual or event of Italian history,
they were always “about” Mussolini. Every celebration was predicated on, and was
directed at, the audience’s ability to read Il Duce’s visual articulation of his and his
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 45
government’s power. The reburial of Anita constituted only one (large) part of an official
culture of spectacle
18
that included numerous parades demonstrating the fascist emphasis
on the history of Italy as directed toward a realization of the fascist moment.
(Figure 7. This collage stresses the crowd’s role
in the “composition” of Mussolini.
Note the use of both the Western and fascist year date)
The accumulation of these various political and cultural successes eventually
transformed Mussolini into the central fact of fascist culture. By the mid-1920s and
continuing throughout his tenure as prime minister, Mussolini was the central figure of
Italian life—nearly every division of culture was attentive to him. The journalist, writer,
editor-in-chief of La Voce, and contemporary to Mussolini, Giuseppe Prezzolini, writes in
his book Fascism (first translated into English in 1926) that by the mid-20s, Mussolini
18
The fascists had already relied heavily on the spectacle—or performance—of their
power, beginning with the violent, public assertions of their authority and coming to its
maturity with the March on Rome. The filmmaker Federico Fellini, who came of age
during Mussolini’s rule, sometimes parodies this fascist impulse in his work, but
especially in his autobiographical film Amarcord (1973). One of the more memorable
scenes features a parade of young boys in front of a massive head of Mussolini made of
flowers.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 46
was a Will—”All his faculties are bent upon the attainment of his ends” (62)—and a
Force “[that] must be acknowledged as a simple, elementary and indisputable fact” (63).
For Prezzolini, who was living and writing in Italy at the time, Mussolini was the most
significant culture maker (“a force which, hurled into the very centre of Italy’s body, took
command of the organs and set them functioning” [64]) in living memory, and one that
could appeal to those around the world. For Prezzolini, Mussolini is the correction of the
failures of Wilson and Lenin, a figure of the Italian imagination as well as that of all
nations, a leader capable or reforming the country “even if it should involve the
renunciation of certain liberties” (65) for the greater good. In many ways Prezzolini’s
description of Mussolini suggests more an idea than a figure. But this image of an
undemocratic, but nevertheless popular leader (=emperor) is very much in keeping with
the classicist side of the fascist cultural program.
The second Italian narrative Mussolini co-opted was that of ancient Rome. While
the fascists made every effort to emphasize the continuity of their political program to a
heavily edited nineteenth-century, their nebulous connection to ancient Rome, and the
culture of romanità that emerged from it, held an equal sway in the Italian imaginary.
Quoted in Fogu, the scholar Piergiorgio Zunino writes that the Roman past provided “a
sea in which anyone could fish out anything for any occasion: a reminder, a justification,
a title of whatsoever nobility” (Fogu 24). Much of this interest in resurrecting Rome in
fascist ideology was underwritten by Benedetto Croce and Gentile. As I wrote earlier,
Gentile had an especially forceful influence on the construction of the Roman narrative.
He writes in his essay “The Philosophic Basis of Fascism” that the state is not “a material
presupposition,” but rather a living “creation of the mind” (Gentile 263) that is generated
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 47
when the individual (and especially the individual in a crowd) actively makes history a
present action. It isn’t difficult to imagine this argument, with its emphasis on the
existence of the Italian state as a function of both reading and thinking, leading toward an
attempt to revive Augustan Rome in the present, especially in the wake of the crippling
insecurities the First World War produced. For the fascists, Augustan Rome could be
revived, and this revival became central to the fascist conception of the security and
imperialist ambitions of the state. As Mussolini declared in a speech in 1922, Rome was
the ghost animating the fascist state: “Rome is our point of departure and our point of
reference: it is our symbol, or if you will, our myth” (Stone 205). And not only was Rome
their point of departure, in many ways it was their point of arrival. This narrative was
used for the most part to legitimize Mussolini’s absolute power as a continuation of an
eternal Italian history. It was also used to promote the invasion of North Africa as
historically justified.
For the fascists, Rome was the perfect site to situate their own political program
in, especially as they strove to normalize themselves in the historical imagination of Italy.
The image of Rome, with its strength, centralized leadership, and robust culture, was a
fertile symbolic code out of which the fascists, especially Mussolini, could derive images
of their own power. Italy’s Gentilean interest in reviving the ancient past produced a
widespread culture of romanità that influenced and was influenced by a general interest
in classicism across Europe. Marla Stone writes in her essay “A Flexible Rome: Fascism
and the cult of romanità,
Romanità, the quality of Romanness, for the Fascists , meant a profound
spiritual and historical destiny to be made real through Fascism. […]
Rome gave form to ideological constructs such as economic autarchy,
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 48
Italian military prowess, imperial destiny, demographic urgency, the cult
of the leader, national culture and Fascism’s civilizing mission. (205-206.)
For Stone, Rome made the fascist program cohere, providing ample space for
interpretation of a vast array of symbols—the fasces, for one
19
—that could cloak their
“renovations” of Italian culture in a “revival” of one of the most powerful empire in
world history. The state funded countless projects to restore ancient monuments (most
notably the Ara Pacis, only recently completed) around Rome, numerous mural projects
that depicted classical scenes, and initiated a patronage program that favored Classicist
art—one of the key programs that attracted Pound to Mussolini. The fascists configured
their ideological position as one interested in renewing Italy through a return to an eternal
ideal of Rome, sloughing off the self-defeating, anti-Italian socialist reforms of the
nineteenth century. The fascists drew a line between the un-Italian, faceless left and the
real Italians, the inheritors of the Roman empire who’d spent centuries split from one
another and from power, a line the entire cultural milieu enforced through constant
iterations of faithfulness to Mussolini and the fascist government. The collective
experience of romanità, of a new Italian culture directed toward making the power of
antiquity present propelled the fascist program into every aspect of Italian culture.
19
Kenneth E. Silver writes in his essay “A More Durable Self,” “Beginning with the
fasces, the axe-head projecting from a bundle of elm or birch rods tied with a red leather
strap that gave the movement its name—an old Roman symbol of strength in unity and
suggestive of the penal power of the state—Mussolini’s government was extremely
conscious of building a consensus through propaganda, visual and aural (the power of
radio, as the new means to reach the masses, was recognized from early on). ‘Eagles,
Roman standards, and she-wolves,’ as curator Simonetta Fraquelli writes, ‘gradually
infiltrated many aspects of everyday life in Italy from advertising to textbooks, even to
SPQR inscriptions on drain covers’” (30).
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 49
Within this “cult,” as Stone refers to it, a stronger personality cult developed
around Mussolini, one which added yet another layer to the symbolic character of Il
Duce—that of Caesar Augustus. Stone writes that, by the mid-1930s, the fascist party
installed cultural structures that could diffuse the cult of Mussolini and construe it as the
reign of Augustus. This diffusion was achieved through a re-orientation in the arts toward
classicism, which I will touch on momentarily, and public spectacles on par with that of
the reburial of Anita Garibaldi. The fascists celebrated many national heroes and histories
in order to claim them for themselves, to determine what of Virgil or Dante would be
celebrated, and how. In 1937, Mussolini absorbed the image of Augustus within his own
with the celebration of his 2000
th
birthday. Stone writes,
The most extensive mobilization of Romanness in Fascist official culture
was the 1937 celebration of the bi-millenium of the birth of the emperor
Augustus, the Mostra augustea della Romania (Augustan exhibition). This
exhibition observed the 2000
th
anniversary of the birth of Augustus as the
occasion for a vast archaeologically focused exhibition celebrating the
Roman empire at its apex. With the Mostra augustea della Romania,
Fascism represented itself as the inexorable culmination of Italian history.
The Augustan exhibition, held in the heart of Rome, was a vast
extravaganza which revivified the ‘historic’ Rome of Augustus through an
empiricist discourse of Roman superiority. (215)
The inauguration of this exhibit, and of the Fascist Revolution Museum only an hour
later, by Mussolini himself reinforced Fascism’s “imperial/militarist and now backward-
looking self-image” (Stone 216). This self-image, reformulated after the 1920s to
construe Mussolini as Augustus, was quite successful, and achieved in part by a general
move toward the aestheticization (read Romanization) of politics. For Walter Benjamin,
these aesthetic cults of Il Duce and Rome emerged to instill in the proletariat a post-
individualist “mass sense” that thrived on continuous collective experience of the state,
experience achieved not only by grand political spectacles, like the March on Rome or
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 50
the Augustan exhibition, but also by war, thereby ensuring a kind of extreme faith in the
actions of the state that would ultimately gear it toward war. These spectacles, written by
Mussolini into the Italian imagination, formed what (as I quoted earlier) Marla Stone
refers to as a kitsch, “hyperbolic iconography” (209) that graphed the ancient past over
the modern, programming the culture with a need for violence similar to that of Rome.
20
In fact, Benjamin writes that fascism itself is an anesthetization of politics predicated on a
desire for violence,
21
the “consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art’” in which politics function
as a self-generating system of representation that can only satisfy itself with itself. He
writes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “[Mankind’s] self-
alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an
aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Benjamin 242). He writes that the motto of Fascism
should be “Fiat ars pereat mundus”: Let art be made even if the world should perish.
Fascist Italy was not merely a re-imagined politics of the state, it was a political aesthetic
of empire configured as a new totalizing culture, one that could be exported around the
globe—beginning with northern Africa. This aestheticization was often in a
Modernist/Classicist mode. For example, when the fascist government commemorated
the Italian victory over Ethiopia, the state commissioned a statue of Athena by the
20
For Mussolini, the masses themselves represented an aesthetic object that required both
interpretation and sculpting by a creative genius. In an interview, Mussolini described his
role as leader: “What would the masses do if they did not have their own interpreter who
was expressed by the spirit of the populace, and what would the poet do if he did not
have the material to forge?” (Falasca-Zamponi 23).
21
Russell A. Berman writes Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the
Legacy of the Avant-garde that this was directly opposed to a progressive “politicization
of the arts” he proposes that, unlike fascism, “would convene a collective recipient (‘the
masses’) endowed with an active and critical character” (Berman 39, emphasis mine).
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 51
sculptor Arturo Martini. The state, in a sense, expressed itself through art and spectacle,
both of which were configured to give that expression classical form.
The aesthetic, fascist state, with its emphasis on the politician as artist,
hypertextualized Mussolini, especially as the cult of Il Duce grew in the late 1920s and
evolved into a cult of Mussolini as Garibaldi and Augustus. In fact, Mussolini
consciously shaped this process as much as he passively accepted it, articulating himself
as both artist and masterpiece, author and text—much in the same way Augustus figured
himself as both ruler and maker. This is a threat Pound takes up in Guide to Kulchur
something I will return to in the next chapter. Like Mussolini, Augustus put himself at the
center of the arts (through patronage) and at the architectural and cultural renovation of
Rome. While these numerous faces of Mussolini (Modernist, agrarian activist,
Risorgimento hero, artist, Il Duce, Roman emperor) were often contradictory, their
variety of audiences helped to ensure that Mussolini’s appeal was maximized across the
country. When the journalist Emil Ludwig asked Mussolini how he reconciled the
theatricality of his life with his interest in the health of the public, he responded, “The
interest of the populace is a dramatic thing. Since I serve it, I multiply myself.” Once
again, the stress is on the multiplicity of Mussolinis available to the populace. Statecraft
was as much a public service as it was a private one for Mussolini. Mussolini considered
himself “the creative soul of the nation,” and explained himself as an artist exclusively
interested in the production of beauty—”the artificer of a ‘beautiful’ system and a
‘beautiful’ doctrine,” as he describes himself in that same interview (Falasca-Zamponi
16). These multiple artificers created a vortex at the center of Italian culture—to borrow
an image from Pound—that directed all the focus of the arts inward, toward him. To
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 52
paraphrase Lyttleton, Mussolini was everything for everyone at once. Falasca-Zamponi
writes that Mussolini’s engagement with the arts created a “reciprocity between reality
and representation, [in which] the myth of Mussolini continued to expand, developing
independently of the regime” (56). This proliferation of Mussolini(s) was achieved
largely through a robust arts culture in both the public and private spheres—a culture
that, like the fascists, was explicitly interested in reviving antiquity.
The 2010 Guggenheim exhibit “Chaos & Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and
Germany, 1918-1936,” which was the original inspiration for this essay, exhaustively
showcased the extent to which fascism was figured as a continuation of the political and
cultural regimes of the ancient past. After the First World War, across Europe, in public,
in mainstream and avant-garde art, classicism was revived as the dominant mode of
expression—gradually moving away from frenetic representation, like Cubism, toward a
solider one.
22
In his introductory essay to the Guggenheim catalog,
23
art critic Kenneth
Silver argues that classical form represented an alternative to the terrifying, chaotic,
22
Picasso, for example, turned toward French classicism in the 20’s with paintings like
Large Bather (1921) and The Source (1921). Like the other arts, architecture moved in a
similar direction. Le Corbusier explicitly reacted against Cubism in favor of Classicism in
his manifesto “Après le cubisme.” He argues for the arts to provide an antidote to the
mess of the war. “Here [in post-Cubist art], only order and purity illuminate and orient
life; […] To the same extent that [yesterday] was troubled, uncertain of its path, that
which is beginning is lucid and clear” (Silver 20). Stanislaus van Moos writes in his Le
Corbusier, Elements of a Synthesis that Le Corbusier, like other intellectuals of the time,
argued that Cubism was an “elitist escape” and an “esoteric game with ornamental
forms” (Van Moos 48). Classicism, on the other hand, was a purer form, linked to an
eternal past of cleanliness and coherence.
23
Studies in this art are relatively new, and the Guggenheim exhibit organized by Silver
represents the most public display of this kind of work. Before him, the most famous
essay on the subject is Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of
Regression: Notes on the Return to Representation in European Painting” in October
magazine. But unlike Silver, Buchloh treats all returns to “order” as the same across
Europe, thereby erasing the meaningful differences between the many fascisms and
classicisms that Silver emphasizes.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 53
fragmented world of the war, and much of its appeal (like the appeal of fascism) came
from its explicit desire to return to order after the troubling realities of war in the
industrialized world. He writes,
the postwar culture of self-conscious forgetting rather than recollection, in
which sublimation rather than frank confrontation with unpleasant facts
determined the most significant new art forms. All the postwar talk about
life being too frenetic—and the need to rein it in—was really not about
life, but about how not to look death in the face. (19)
The art of this period sought to oppose, and correct, the “eternally fragmented and ragged
lives” of European with an “image of something totally finished and complete,” as the
German critic Franz Roh wrote. “Someday man too will be able to recreate himself in the
perfection of his idea” (Silver 27).
24
The reintroduction of formal cleanliness—of a
Classical formalism, howbeit restored from its fragments in museums to completion
was one method for reorganizing and reconstituting a Europe devastated by war. The
subjectivist realities of the art movements of the latter half of the nineteenth century,
especially Impressionism and post-Impressionism, could no longer be counted on as
images for the European environment. Sculpture, for example, with its solidness became
an important “touchstone” for the other arts, especially painting, “as both the symbol of
an ancient heritage and the correction for unreliable, contingent, perishable life” (Silver
17). Sculpture was one of the primary modes of expression (along with painting and
24
This now seems like a curious position. After all, it was the idea of man, the perfection
of his creative faculties, of the technologies of communication, warfare, and travel, that
had so fundamentally “let down’” dream of a war-free Europe in the first place. And
following the First World War, these technologies continued to accelerate, expand, and
prolong war rather than facilitate the technocratic-utopian visions of early twentieth
century inventors and politicians (who, it should be remembered, outlawed war with the
Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1929).
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 54
mural
25
) for Mussolini’s government, and for the cult of Il Duce—and was a central
influence on major modernist painters, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse.
Classicism became a perfect outlet for the fascist state, as it provided an enormous
field of discourse in which the artist, the traditionalist, the peasant, and the historian
could mine for inspiration. The fragmentary, loose narrative of Rome and its artifacts,
like the de-contextualized African masks the Cubists seized in the earlier part of the
century, provided the fascists a historically-grounded, but open space in which they could
center their own ideological program. Marla Stone quotes C.E. Oppo, the Secretary
General of the Roman Quadriennale and “advocate of the modern,” who called for a
modern classicism to be integrated into the fascist state: “Fascism … must have the
courage to bear the weighty crown … of our great artistic heritage with the ease of an old
gentleman wearing a monocle … In Italy there can be no neo-classicism simply because
classicism has never grown old. In Italy one is either a classicist or nothing” (210).
Classicist or nothing, much in the same way that one was either fascist or nothing. As
Stone argues, classicism was an ideological construct that didn’t seek to revitalize the
contemporary with classical knowledge, rather it was a teleological effort to remake the
ancient past into the fascist past. Points of similarity (like the cult of the leader) enabled
for cultural intersections to develop, and allow for the contemporary and the past to meet
as the fascist present.
Countless other fascists publically supported the classicist state and its arts,
discrediting, ultimately, competitive movements within the avant-garde, like Futurism.
25
Muralists received an extra boost from the state with the passage of the Two-Percent
Law, which ordered 2% of all spending on public works to be used for decoration. Much
of this spending was used for classicist murals of everyday citizens. (Stone 211-12).
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 55
The Futurists mostly opposed the fascists’ classicism. For Emilio Settimelli, the
“antisocialist, anticlerical, anti-traditional” regime of “genius, art, force, unequalism,
beauty, mind, elegance, originality, color, fantasy” could not be reconciled with
classicism. The Italian empire must be Italian, he writes, “for a Roman empire would be
an act of restoration or plagiarism” (Settimelli 274). However, the extremely influential
art critic and mistress of Mussolini, Margherita Sarfatti, was a leading advocate of the
classicist revival, and used her position to discredit Marinetti and the other Futurists.
Silver writes,
Her taste for an art at once old and new, virile yet sensitive, modern but
tempered by the ‘constructive’ principles of the past, deeply Italian but not
parochial—in short, a new classicism—put her at odds with her only real
competition for cultural dominance in the Fascist Party, Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti, a friend and early supporter of Mussolini. In the years just
before World War I, Marinetti’s Futurism […] finally put Italy on the
international contemporary-art map—no mean feat—but his extremism
was now outmoded. Although his bellicose, nationalist avant-garde
movement had much that was congenial to the Fascists, his stance against
what he considered Italy’s cult of the past—’the annoying memory of
Roman greatness,’ as he wrote—condemned Futurism to history. (31)
Sarafatti’s aesthetic vision appealed to the state, and therefore won out. Those artists,
many of whom are now forgotten, were also most willing to make use of the preferred
political position of the artist: subservient to the state, responsible for representing the
idealized Italian citizen. Other critics joined her in condemning Futurism, including
Prezzolini, who argued (in response to G.K. Chesterton’s conflation of both Futurism and
fascism) that fascism, unlike Futurism, tried “to restore all our moral values” (FA 276).
Marinetti’s influence was quickly dispatched, and opposition to classicism as the
dominant mode became negligible.
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 56
Mussolini’s patronage programs and general interest in the arts made him a
centerpiece of classicist arts. Many artists who worked at the time, particularly sculptors,
saw in Mussolini’s features (both physically and philosophically) numerous strains of
Italian culture, from Futurist to Modernist to Classical. In many cases, the emphasis was
on all three at once. Adolfo Wildt’s Portrait of Benito Mussolini (ca. 1925) is one
example of the use of Mussolini to stress his classical, Augustan personality. The bust,
while consciously recalling those of the Roman emperors, mixes a Modernist realism
(dynamic, expressive features) with a Classical idealism: the bust is not so much of
Mussolini as it is of power, much in the way busts and statues of Roman emperors most
frequently represented them when they were young and virile, and therefore at the heights
of their physical, if not political, power. The exclusion of the eyes also recalls most
ancient bronze busts, the eyes of which have been lost.
(Figure 8)
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 57
This bust stresses the different choices artists faced when representing Mussolini, and the
degree to which they could pick and choose influences in order to emphasize different
characteristics of his public personality. Wildt’s Portrait is large, bronze, and recalls the
imperial power of Mussolini. It does not stress the futurist Il Duce, the figure accelerating
into the mechanized future that Marinetti found so compelling, nor does it stress the more
painterly Risorgimento history. The bust is a chilly fragment of an ancient past recently
reinvented, or better: rewritten. Wildt’s bust of Mussolini recalls a visual tradition and its
politics that both existed and didn’t. This particular bust is representative of much of
fascism’s project: the drive to bring into being a past that can simultaneously exist as
independent of and dependent on the present moment. Wildt, who has been mostly
forgotten, articulates the fascist desire to make Mussolini both the symbol of his own
power and the symbol of ancient power, of fascism and of Augustus.
The representational possibilities of Mussolini were endless. The countless
traditions, discourses, and symbols that linked to him, and thereby constituted him,
provided hundreds of images to draw upon in the construction of an original image of
power. Mussolini could exist in abstract, Modernist form, as in the case of Thayaht’s Il
Duce with Milestone (1929, left), or in Futurist eternal motion, like in Renato Bertelli’s
Continuous Profile of Mussolini (1933, right):
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 58
(Figure 9) (Figure 10)
At the Guggenheim’s exhibit all three of these busts were lined up together, commenting,
I think, on the nexus of representational opportunities that were made available to artists
under the fascist regime. While Marinetti’s futurism lost its state-endorsement, its
representational mode proved helpful to the regime, especially as it geared the public for
another world war. Like the Risorgimento and Rome, it too was absorbed into the cult of
Mussolini, and became a generative site for representation in service of the state.
Like the various artists that represented Mussolini, the Italian spectator could pick
and choose from the various representational modes that Mussolini made available to him
or her through his appropriation of the various conversations that figured him. Each
aspect of Mussolini’s career in power was linked back to a discourse, and every reader of
Mussolini’s events and life were invited to refer back to that discourse in order to “read
into” him whatever satisfied their criteria for a capable leader. As I argued before,
Mussolini functioned more like a hypertextual site than a traditional leader, as a coherent
II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 59
text that constantly redirects the inquiring reader to source material in order to disclose its
intellectual origins. As a political tactic, this didn’t make Mussolini more transparent,
rather it enabled him to distract his readers with the various histories and personalities he
claimed were his own. The obvious, present form was never very clear, but always stood
out in the crowd as a refractory hall of mirrors, never exactly reflecting the view, but
rather what the viewer expected to see.
For Pound, whose own poetry frequently adopted or impersonated historical
modes of composition (in translation and imitation of the works of Chinese poets,
troubadours, Old English writers, and the Classical authors), Mussolini must have
appealed because he was such a nexus of disparate meanings and traditions brought
together by one man. Like much of Pound’s own work, and especially the Cantos, which
has been frequently referred to as hypertextual (and has even been partially made into one
on the Internet), Mussolini contained history, and in containing it cherry-picked,
imagined, and revised the threads of historical inquiries and narratives he sought and
bound together into an authoritative image of history—much in the way the fasces, once
it binds together the sticks that beforehand had no symbolic power, becomes the
authoritative image of power. As I’ll discuss in the next chapter, the Cantos are a kind of
literary analog to Mussolini: both are formally interested in impersonation, reanimation,
and revision of historical particulars into a new narrative that propose themselves as the
tool to decipher the secret meaning of the narratives they construct.
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 60
III
Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound
For is what I have made be only salvage?
—Clark Coolidge
The difficulty of Pound begins with how he reads. The following chapter will not
be able to fully engage his reading practice, entirely understand it, or disentangle it; the
wily spirit of Pound designed its receptacles, particularly Guide to Kulchur and Cantos,
so that any attempt to full unravel the knot will only frustrate your efforts. This isn’t to
say that Pound’s intelligence is such that he escapes comprehension, but that
comprehension wasn’t always the motivating force behind him—rather, it is an
underlying sense of contradiction and accidence, of imitation and renewal that propels
much of Pound’s work. Pound’s poetry and (less often) his prose stand in direct
opposition to any attempt to parse it out fully: the range of details that have accumulated
into his work come from everywhere, often lack citation, and any attempt to account for
them all would be futile (even if most can be)—and this, for Robert Duncan in The H.D.
Book at least, was the motivating power behind his “impersonating genius.” Pound comes
from everywhere, from research and exploration as well as error, and he doesn’t always
want you to know where everywhere is. Hugh Kenner points out in his essay “Notes on
Amateur Emendations” that some of those most mysterious and enigmatic moments in
Pound come straight from printing mistakes. For example, Canto 13 ends with a repeated
line, and an erroneous quotation mark. Why? Kenner, when he proposed to anthologize
the poem to Pound, asked him. He received the following reply: “Repeat in 13 sanctioned
by time and the author, or rather first by the author, who never objects to the typesetter
making improvements” (Kenner 26). My first impulse here is to write an exclamation
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 61
point and leave it at that. Rather than correct the typesetter’s superfluous addition to the
text, Pound leaves it, and allows his poem to absorb a new emphasis that wasn’t present
before. As Kenner points out, there are hundreds more known errors such as this one, but
it’s anyone’s guess as to number of the unknown. Many of the known errors originate in
typesetting errors in the Greek and Chinese. Others, including the unknown, come from
Pound’s sources—including his concise Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon. While Pound’s
Greek is famously wonky, a misprint in the lexicon led him to an erroneous title in
Lustra. But in Pound, error can turn into knowledge as much as any fact can: history is
full of errors, and yet we continue to read and write it. While history is a source of
enormous anxiety for Pound, especially because it can be so easily manipulated to
exclude or conceal the truth, it is also a site of enormous potential for new paths out of
the contemporary moment. Even if most of normative history might be a conspiracy
against the truth, that never means that history itself can’t be used for the better. One of
Europe’s many problems was usury, but it didn’t matter that Pound couldn’t always
locate all the facts or that there were holes in his theory because he felt, based on his
analyses of some histories and sources, that it was true, that history had been intentionally
obscured by agents of usury. In this regard, the absence of a fact becomes the evidence of
its existence. The flaw in this history-writing model is obvious, and Pound’s teleological
search for a league of corrupting Jews in the banks, and therefore in the Western machine
(“JEW/nation,” he describes the United States in one of his radio speeches), lead him to
disastrous conclusions about who causes war.
But this chapter will not focus too much on Pound’s anti-Semitism. I don’t want
to suggest that it isn’t an important issue, or one that isn’t crucial to a full understanding
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 62
of Pound’s economics and poetics, but Pound’s anti-Semitism poses a number of
problems, many of which do not relate directly to his fascism. Pound wasn’t led to
fascism because of its apparent anti-Semitism, but because it proposed, in part, a
correction to capitalism—one centered around an eternal, truer Roman history, and a
fairer economic model. The image of the Jew in Pound reflects less his fascism than it
does his poor economics, which Pound developed out of his flawed research into history
and his confused reading of the enablers of the present capitalism system. As Jean-Paul
Sarte writes (quoted in Paul Morrison’s Poetics of Fascism),
The anti-Semite has a fundamental incomprehension of the various forms
of modern property: money, securities, etc. They are abstractions […] The
anti-Semite can conceive only of a type of primitive ownership of land
based on a veritable magical rapport, in which the thing possessed and its
possessor are united by a bond of mystical participation; he is the poet of
real property . . . (Morrison 52)
Anyone who has read through Pound’s fascist writings, including those in Machine Art
and the radio speeches, has immediately registered Pound’s teleological, prejudiced
approach to history. It’s not only bad, it’s mostly non-sense. For Pound the Jew is a
Maxwell’s demon, the invisible mediator that makes the system he opposes function.
26
Naturally there is no such thing, or at least no such conspiratorial, racial thing, but in an
effort to locate it Pound generated an enormous mythology to back up his accusations.
The Jews control the banks, the newspapers, the governments, exchange rates, art,
26
Paul Morrison writes in introduction to Poetics of Fascism, “Modernism (for the Other
People)”: “The Jew remains in the discourse of poststructuralism no less than in Pound,
the privileged figure for figuration, the paradoxical (non)referent for a semiotic order, at
once linguistic and economic, which eludes referentiality. And while this is
(emphatically) not to impute anti-Semitic motives, conscious or otherwise, to
poststructuralism, it is to insist that the poststructuralist identification of the Jew with the
nonteleological, nonreferential play of language unwittingly serves to naturalize the
traditional (and traditionally disastrous) association of the Jew with the closed semiotics,
the infinitely deferred finalities, of capitalist economies” (Morrison 10).
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 63
religion, everything. The Jew in Pound, the ghost in the war machine, is not only a sign
of usury, but, as Bob Perelman points out in his book Trouble with Genius, is a sign of
the moral decay of Western civilization (Perelman 66), a kind of symbolic catch-all.
27
I can’t account for everything in Pound—his reading list far exceeds the scope of
this paper. He is both elusive and allusive, sometimes choosing to reveal the rules of the
complex language/compositional game of his poetics, sometimes not. I don’t want to
over-rely on the metaphor, but the image of the game is helpful for understanding
Pound’s elliptical work: the extent to which the play of references, of histories and
fictions, seems designed in part to activate a game-sense in the reader, one that requires
thinking through as much as it does thinking about the language. The system of
particulars that generate meaning in the Cantos is not arranged in such a way that the
reader will immediately, or even with much time, understand what’s “going on” in the
narrative or syntactical sense of the work. In this paper I will not only draw some
conclusions on the ethics that underscore this compositional practice, but also trace some
of the origins of this practice outside it that have not been explored in much depth by
27
For Pound not every Jew is usurious, the Jewish race is predisposed to greedy
utilitarianism and self-interestedness. In a 1955 letter to Louis Zukofsky (a Jewish poet
and friend of Pound’s), Pound writes, “The statement that NO jew will ever do anything
useful, cannot be sustained / [economist Alexander] Del Mar did a whale of a LOT that
was and is useful. It might be asked: under what circs/ will a jew do anything useful to
anyone but himself, OR to anyone but himself when not considering the ultimate utility
in reflex” (P/Z 211). Even after the war, when Pound had supposedly “recanted” his anti-
Semitism and fascist support, Pound can’t help but frame the Jew in terms of a
stereotyped half-knowledge. Pound didn’t need evidence to back his claims that the Jews
ran the banks and started the wars, he felt it—even if the outcome of a conflict like World
War Two so obviously opposed any theory that the Jews wanted a war that would very
nearly eliminate them. I don’t have time for this aspect of Pound, though I recognize its
central presence in much of his writings. Thankfully, numerous critics—and friends of
Pound—have criticized him and his work, parsing as best they can the sources,
motivations, and mistakes that compose his anti-Semitism.
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 64
Pound’s critics. Pound’s poem has often been compared to a hypertext, and parts of it
have even been made into one online, but the degree to which that hypertext is a mirror of
the living hypertext I proposed in the previous chapter has been underexplored. In this
chapter I will attempt to establish some link between Gentile/Mussolini and
Pound/Cantos: not a perfect mirror image of one another, but certainly an image of
occasional, shared glances, fragments that bear a family resemblance, mutual interests,
and related conclusions.
Gentile’s argument for the integration of the past into present consciousness is
echoed in the contemporaneous aesthetic program developed by T.S. Eliot (as I
referenced earlier in this essay) and Pound. Whether Gentile was on Pound’s mind when
he began to develop this program is somewhat unclear; it is very likely that he read him,
or was in some way familiar with his ideas, especially while he was living in Italy. His
interest in Italian culture, in museum culture, and in Futurism and fascism would
certainly have brought him within close proximity of Gentile’s arguments. In any case,
his argument in the “Praelatio” section of the Spirit of Romance (1910) certainly
anticipates Gentile:
It is dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of
Hercules. All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C., let us say, in
Morrocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the
minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time
is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grand-
children’s contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have
already been gathered into Abraham’s bosom, or some more fitting
receptacle. (SR VI.)
But Pound’s argument isn’t quite Gentile’s. He seems more interested in (1) the relative
development of societies (and therefore in discrediting the facile view of linear history
based on progress) and in (2) an auratic or spiritual trans-historical quality of literature.
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 65
However, Pound is certainly beginning an argument that would eventually evolve into a
Gentilean poetics for agency in historiography, a revisionary poetics based on
representation of historical data and narratives within a new, present mode, like in the
elision of Sigismondo and other epic heroes with Mussolini in the early cantos, which I’ll
return to later in this chapter. Pound, surveying the industrialization of various
geographical locations around the planet, draws a conclusion on the function of history:
that the narrative of progress imposed by the West, which he seems to implicitly
condone, operates at relative speed. This observation leads him to develop a poetics that
levels literary history as a horizontal field upon which writers of any age can sync up
with one another. Rather than conceive of an unattainable past, Pound begins in the Spirit
of Romance to think about a poetics that frees him from contemporary restraints and
allows him to enter into a dialectical conversation with the writers of the previous eras.
Pound’s proto-Gentilean argument—that “All ages are contemporaneous”—is
more fully developed by T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the thinking
of which Jean-Michel Rabaté argues was likely inspired by the “Praelatio” of The Spirit
of Romance (Rabaté 214). There is no concrete evidence that this is true, but in all
likelihood conversation and collaboration with Pound, in addition to reading his criticism,
led Eliot to his conclusions in “Tradition.” Modifying Rabaté, I would also argue that
“Tradition” emerges out of Eliot’s temporary conversion to Bergsonism (later revised in
his thesis on F.H. Bradley) and his philosophy of history while he studied at Harvard.
However, the critical program that jointly forms (and informs) the two writers is owed in
large part to their friendship. Eliot certainly articulates a view of history that seems to
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 66
have been on Pound’s mind in 1910, and later becomes central to his poetics in the
Cantos. Eliot suggests tradition is a history that operates as
a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the
historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own
generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature
of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own
country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
(Tradition)
For Eliot, history is a series of continuously developing patterns recorded as tradition.
Timothy Materer writes in his essay “T.S. Eliot and his critical program” that “Eliot
becomes convinced that no experience is ‘real nor any ‘fact’ valid unless it fits into a
pattern or system of relations that gives it meaning—even though this meaning can never
be final since the pattern is always changing and the system always developing.” (51) G.
Douglas Atkins, in his critical study of Eliot’s criticism, T.S. Eliot and the Essay, agrees:
In “Tradition,” “pattern or structure emerges as most important, and Eliot will spend his
career honoring that sense of the prevailing and revealing pattern.” (54) In Eliot’s view,
this pattern is crucial not only because it informs the present but because the present
informs (=alters) it, ascribing to those who participate in the weaving of tradition an
enormous agency, similar to Gentile’s reader of history as present. Both argue for an
increased agency in the reader, and the way that reader’s participation in tradition (or
historiography) can construct and reconstruct its narrative as a present.
However, there isn’t any real evidence that Eliot had much knowledge of
Gentile—he very likely had never heard of him at the time he was writing “Tradition”—
nor can the fascist tendencies in Eliot’s writings be credited to the Italians. Eliot’s
fascistic Europeanism, which he explicitly argued for in his essays in the Criterion, was
based mostly on his interest in Charles Maurras and the L’action Française of the 1920’s.
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 67
And Eliot, as Peter Dale Scott writes, ultimately rejected fascism out of Christian
opposition to its materialism (65). Cleo Kearns agrees, writing that Eliot located in
Christianity the only ethics that could oppose the “untrammeled operations of modern
finance and the assumption in both domestic and foreign affairs of […] real-politik
(Kearns 91). Although both Eliot and Pound disagreed on a fundamental political level,
both developed, and sought, an ethics and poetics that could propose an alternative to
capitalism. In any case, Eliot’s flirtation with Charles Maurras was not really one with
fascism, and any resemblance his ideas might bear to Gentile’s can probably be traced to
a similar, but common reading list.
28
Like Gentile, who expanded his program to extend
beyond historiography, Eliot later expanded the critical program of “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” by broadening his definition of “tradition” in the 1933 lectures that
would become After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. Tradition, for Eliot, is
not only the accumulation of texts and compositional practice, it is, as Materer writes, “a
variety of customs—including everything from greeting a stranger to participating in a
religious rite—which are dependent on a stable society and a unified religious
background” (57). Leaving aside Eliot’s religious beliefs (which is quite difficult, but
nevertheless necessitated by the scope of this paper),
29
Eliot’s theory that the present and
28
Eliot’s prejudices and their family resemblance to fascism (particularly his anti-
semitism) merit attention, but this isn’t the focus of this paper. Peter Dale Scott writes
that Eliot’s prejudices were not limited to him, but to “culture he adopted.” Eliot
participated “in processes of rationalization and denial”—particularly in an anonymously
written article in the Criterion that dismisses an early expose of Nazi genocidal practices
as “sensationalist”—“for which we may better seek psychological than logical
explanations” (66). I’m not so certain of this, but again the scope of this paper limits my
ability to investigate further.
29
Eliot eventually developed a Christian metaphysics that made Christianity the site of
transcendence of history. Pound, whose religious feelings are knotted, opaque, and
changing are decidedly unlike Eliot’s. For one, Pound found the Christian use of the Old
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 68
past can alter one another through individual present action certainly must have appealed
to Pound, if only because it so clearly reflected his own thinking.
Pound’s thinking on history before the war culminated in Guide to Kulchur, his
1938 “guidebook” for Paideuma, or “the new thinking.” This new thinking is, for Pound,
Confucian at its basis: “a type of perception,
30
a kind of transmission of knowledge
obtainable only from such concrete manifestation” (GK 28)—an Anschauung of history
that privileges intuition over than book knowledge. In Pound’s reading of the Analects
and the Odes, Confucian knowledge, which is a knowledge more directly related to the
world than most of Western thinking, has “no syllogistic connection” between historical
data points because those connections are beside the point, and if any exist, are likely
borne out of misperception. But Pound’s argument on intuitive knowledge in Guide to
Kulchur is problematic precisely because it presupposes a previous knowledge of history
and texts, but nevertheless argues that any intellectual work, including the trans-historical
connections between writers and ideas, is intuitive—the foundation of Pound’s privileged
understanding, the immediate grasping of the fact of things and their meanings. While
knowledge “may be necessary to understanding,” “it weighs as nothing against [it] …
once you understand process” (GK 50). Pound’s prose is often clipped, and rarely goes
into greater depth in arguing his more complicated ideas and proposals. Instead he often
the line that others have already explained what he means and the reader should refer to
Testament extremely problematic and likely the source of Europe’s “spiritual
bankruptcy” via usury (MA 133). For Pound, Christianity’s Roman elements—
Catholicism’s quasi-polytheism in the Holy Trinity (MA 143)—was the only appealing
aspect of Christianity. The absolute monotheism of Protestants represented a Jewish
corruption (“that pest of the Occident” [MA 133]) of Roman Europe. Christ, in Poundian
philosophy, is nothing more than an “irresponsible protagonist” (GK 38).
30
cf. Eliot’s use of “perception” in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” especially in
the sections quoted earlier.
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 69
those writers and professors. For Pound, his understanding, which he holds to be superior
(consider how many “guidebooks” he wrote) to that of the general reader, a reader who
he imagines has been waylaid by a general cultural malaise and backwardness, is always
just out of reach. The reader of Pound’s work is often asked to be “patient”—but rarely
does Pound’s criticism ever culminate in a justification of the reader’s patience through
full explication. In the opening of Guide to Kulchur he assures the reader that he has a list
of “perfectly good ideas … thirty feet from where I am sitting,” but he never makes very
clear what those ideas are, only giving the reader brief, vague glimpses into his own
insight on various world cultures, languages, and thinking.
Eliot’s argument about tradition, and Pound’s own argument in the “Praelatio,” is
recapitulated in Guide to Kulchur, but with an even stronger literary sense:
It is quite foolish to suppose that Heraclitus, after the quite H. Jamesian
precisions of the Odyssey, and before the Shakespearian humour of Plato’s
character drawing, merely said “Everything flows,” or that any one
abstract statement wd. have made him his reputation. (GK 31)
Here, and elsewhere, Pound operates with the assumption that’s history’s flow is non-
linear, and that a central mistake of historical thinking is to think of its flow as
chronologically episodic rather than happening relative to a culture. “We do NOT know
the past in chronological sequence,” Pound writes, implicitly arguing for the his approach
to history in the Cantos, rather “what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying
from us and from our own time” (GK 60). Like Eliot, Pound’s position on history is that
it can be influenced as much as it can influence. And for Pound, like Gentile, history is
not a set of ideas, but a set of “ideas going into action” (GK 44)—a decidedly Roman,
rather than Greek, glory for both thinkers. Echoing Gentile and the fascists, Pound’s
explicitly favors Rome over other Western historical moments, arguing that the Romans
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 70
tried, like Confucius, “to work out an orderly system, a modus vivendi for vast multitudes
of mankind” (GK 40). The Greeks, on the other hand, resorted to escape mechanisms
(e.g. Homer) that ultimately crippled the civilization and lead to their defeat and
enslavement. Unfortunately, the progress made by Justinian and Constantine was
interrupted by the twin influences of Jewish and Christian monotheism, which in turn
produced “an age of usury” that devolved Western governments into financially-
motivated, corrupt corporate nations. Pound was opposed to the usurious practices of
banks and their colluding Western governments, and isolated the collapse of Rome as one
of the beginnings of the watering down of the West through financial malpractice. But for
Pound there is an antidote to usury, the practice that muddles definition (and also dissent
against the system): Totalitarianism: “the sorting out, the rappel à l’ordre” (GK 95). This
fact has been distressing for many critics throughout the long reception history of
Pound’s works, and a number of critical strategies have emerged in response to the
obvious “problem” of Pound’s politics. Before I can directly treat the Cantos and their
relationship to Mussolini, I think it’s important to first understand how Pound (as poet
and/or fascist) and the Cantos have been thought about in selected criticism since Hugh
Kenner.
Over a spaghetti dinner in Rapallo in 1928, W.B. Yeats, Pound’s friend and
mentor, asked Richard Aldington: “How do you account for Ezra? Here is a man who
produces the most distinguished work and yet in himself is the most undistinguished of
men” (Carr). Aldington had no response, but perhaps because there is no answer to
Yeats’ somewhat fallacious, but common observation, one that reflects an impulse in
many of Pound’s readers to “divide” him and his works. How can it be done? For critics
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 71
and lovers of Pound’s work, Pound’s fascism has been an enormous headache, and one
that is often enough avoided or dealt with strangely. Bob Perelman rightly argues in his
essay “Pound and the Language of Genius” that Pound must be viewed as a whole, even
if it’s an incoherent and troubling whole. While his works can obviously be graded on a
sliding scale of vitriol, the underlying, evolving poetics cannot, and regardless of the
political content within each work, they are of the same whole. Most often critics have
avoided the fascist question by mentioning it as a biographical detail that temporarily
seized his poetics, only to later be recanted. This strategy has most often taken the form
of a separation between Pound the man and Pound the poet, a schematic approach that
has the two only occasionally overlapping. It was probably first articulated by one of
Pound’s greatest champions, Hugh Kenner, who spent his life promoting and apologizing
for Pound, especially in his seminal (and valuable) book The Pound Era.
Kenner’s work is doubtlessly an essential tool for understanding Pound’s poetry,
criticism, and life. His friendship and correspondence allowed him insight that is crucial
to understanding Pound’s compositional practices, and the ways accidence featured into
Pound’s poetics. However, his criticism’s excuse of Pound’s fascism gave license to
numerous critics and poets that followed him to avoid or cordon off Pound’s toxic
politics as secondary to his poetics. In Kenner, Pound’s anti-Semitism is a semantic
mistake, rather than a racial one (Perelman 42). And like Kenner, Carroll Terrell, who
wrote A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, goes to extraordinary lengths to parse
Pound’s anti-Semitism as a mask for his economic criticism. In Poundian terms, the Jew
is code for usurer, and Pound’s use (and therefore his anti-Semitism) should not be
confused as real anti-Semitism, but rather as anti-usury marked by an empty racism.
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 72
Because of it’s importance to understanding how people think about Pound’s anti-
Semitism, a deep prejudice significant to his fascism, I will quote in full Terrell’s
definition of Pound’s meaning of “kikery.” It is representative of the lengths critics have
gone to redefine Pound’s fascism, and its attendant racism, as problematic but
misunderstood. Note that Terrell (and Kenner, who he quotes from) never identifies the
term as a racial epithet, except perhaps in the use of the word “opprobrious.” In fact,
Terrell quickly moves away from the meaning of the actual word:
55. kikery: An opprobrious epithet Pound applies to usurers and
financiers—who foster wars and depressions to make money—as well as
to intellectuals in universities and the publishing world who appear to
support them. Once, when asked how he could say he was not anti-Semitic
when he used words such as “kike” and “kikery,” he replied with some
feeling: “There are Jew kikes and non-Jew kikes.” Pound marks the
passage in italics to be set in a somewhat smaller type: “carattere un poco
piu piccolo” [MB, Trace, 296]. The passage is intended to rhyme with the
4 lines in The Divine Comedy where, at the summit of Paradise, St. Peter
castigates “him who usurps my seat on earth” and says, “he has made of
my burial place a cloaca of blood and filth” [Par. XXVII, 22-26]. Because
there was no clear thought about the way divinity manifested in the world,
such people as those listed allowed the inciting causes of WWI to operate
in 1913. Marx and Freud need no glosses, but less the reader jump to the
wrong conclusion, see the index to SP, where Marx is listed 18 times and
Freud 4. If one reads all Pound has said about Freud over the years, one
concludes he has less quarrel with Freud than he does with Freudians, a
rhyme with Christ and Christians or the Buddha and Buddhists [99:25].
Pound said: “People treated by Freudians, etc. get steadily more and more
interested in their own footling interiors, and less interesting to anyone
else They are at the nadir from Spinoza’s sane and hearty: the more
perfect a thing is the more it acts and the less it suffers [NEW May 2
1935]. N.B.: The functional words in the 8 lines are, “no clear thought
about holiness.” A parallel to the unhappy custom of using racial epithet is
found in Joyce’s Leopold Bloom who, enraged by a money-lender named
Dodd, said: “Now he’s what you call a dirty Jew.” Dodd in fact wasn’t a
Jew and Bloom was [HK].
But I might add that I think Bloom’s anti-Semitism represents a self-oppressive impulse,
not merely a loose economic condemnation, one that Joyce noted in the Irish and
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 73
analogized in his Jewish protagonist. Fictional Bloom’s response to fictional Dodd is not
the same as non-fictional Pound’s to non-fictional interlocutor. This example of Terrell’s
aversion to noting the racial dimension of Pound’s politics ignores a significant amount
his writing, including the radio speeches, where Pound makes it explicit that the Jews are
inherently usurious, and are responsible for European wars.
The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, arguably the most widely available
source of contemporary Pound criticism, takes a similar approach. Pound’s critics in the
essays stick his fascism in the biographical cage, avoiding its influence on his poetics.
For example, Daniel Albright’s essay “Early Cantos I-XLI” and Ian F. A. Bell’s “Middle
Cantos XLII-LXXI”—which cover the Malatesta cantos and those written while Pound
was living in Mussolini’s Italy—make no mention of fascism or Mussolini, even when
the connection is obvious, as in the case of Pound’s hero Sigismundo, a figure I’ll return
to shortly. Ronald Bush’s essay on the late cantos, the cantos in which fascism is
explicitly dealt with, mostly avoids the question, too. Bush limits his analysis of the
political context of the Pisan Cantos to Pound’s “farewell” to Mussolini in the final canto
in an analytical approach that fails to account for the other passages in the cantos in
which Pound writes about Mussolini. Bush assumes a linearity to the work that simply
doesn’t exist, and bases his central claim on a dubious reading of the Greek “Xaire” at the
end of the poem—a claim I will return to at the end of this chapter. Tim Redman’s essay
“Pound’s politics and economics” amazingly does no better a job at interpreting the
politics of Pound’s poetics, though he was likely selected because much of his writing on
Pound has dealt with Pound’s politics.
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 74
Redman’s book Ezra Pound and Fascism, one of the most recent direct treatments
of Pound’s fascism in book form, fails along similar lines as his essay for the Cambridge
Companion does. Redman struggles to negotiate his criticism of Pound with his
appreciate of the poetry. But rather than try to understand Pound’s politics, the economic,
intellectual, and social crucible in which they formed, Redman attempts to excuse them
as weak and only half-hearted. This simply isn’t true or fair to Pound. Redman’s struggle
to discredit Pound’s political positions seems to emerge out of a misunderstanding of
Pound’s fascism in the first place, and likely relies on popular images (and distaste) for
fascism that elides Italian fascism with National Socialism.
31
Redman downplays
Pound’s anti-Semitism as “unconvincing,” but his argument is nonsensical, as is most of
his virtually useless book on Pound. He argues that Pound’s anti-Semitism was mild, and
reflected, as Terrell wrote before him, an uncomfortable vocabulary rather than actual
racial prejudice. And yet Pound’s fascist period produced the radio speeches, the essays
collected as Machine Art, and little known essays like “Jews and the War,” “The Jew:
Pathology Incarnate”, and “Anglo-Israel” (three essays that Redman himself mentions,
but avoids any discussion of)—documents that are hardly “unconvincing” testaments to
Pound’s anti-Semitism and pro-fascism (Redman 256). Any ethical reader of Pound’s
letters at this time, especially those written to the composer Gerhart Munch, would be
hard-pressed to characterize his endless rants against the “kikes” and their “kikery” as
mild. But Redman is so averse to any criticism Pound’s anti-Semitism that he regularly
falls into contradiction, going so far as to say excuse Pound’s numerous recorded
recommendations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion because they aren’t fanatical
31
This is not to say that one is better or worse, but to say that they are different, and both
have a different relationship to Europe and the Jews.
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 75
enough, and are therefore evidence of Pound’s suspicion of the text. For Redman, the fact
that Pound’s copy isn’t marked as much as his other books suggests that Pound wasn’t
convinced by its argument. While it is certainly true that Pound recognized the
fallaciousness of the fictional document, he nevertheless appreciated it enough to
recommend it in the first place.
Credo: Pound was a fascist, and thoroughly believed in the Mussolini’s regime.
While he was an anti-Semite, his anti-Semitism was mostly incidental to his fascism (he’s
certainly more prejudiced against the Jews than Mussolini was), and this was largely
borne out of a belief that Jews controlled the banks and the banks made war. For Pound,
Mussolini was the best hope to clean up a capitalist system he believed was designed to
bring about war in order to fatten the wallets of a select few. That he named those few the
“Jews” or “kikes” is one of the most significant moral failings of any poet of the
twentieth century, but his anti-Semitism should not be confused with his fascism, even
though it can’t be disentangled from it. I suspect that most critics’ discomfort with
Pound’s politics comes from an inability to unstick themselves from the popular image of
fascism—an image of National Socialism and “Hiterlian yawping,” as Pound wrote of it
in Jefferson And/Or Mussolini, rather than its very different relative, Italian fascism. I
don’t want to excuse Pound’s fascism or Italian fascism generally as benevolent—they
most certainly were not. However, it is worth noting, if only to go some way of
recuperating Pound from his critics, that Pound’s central issue with Western economics,
and therefore of Western government, is usury, the banking practice of levying a charge
“for the use of purchasing power […] without regard to production” (C 230), which he
credits as the single biggest opposition to progress and peace in the world. Somewhat
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 76
strangely, Pound’s racism and fascism emerge from a pacifist desire for peace. This is
most explicit in Guide to Kulchur (GK 61) as well as the Cantos, including one of the
most famous cantos, “XLV”:
With Usura
With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
(C.XLV.230)
The image of a “painted paradise” is complex, and doesn’t simply refer to a false or
artificial image, like one might assume, but rather (as he writes in the later Cantos) is an
image of hope, of a better future than the present that must be necessarily artificial
because it doesn’t exist yet. In the value of the “painted paradise,” Pound centers the poet
and artist, the individual capable of creating an image of a better future out of a terrible
past. Pound continues with a litany of beautiful things that usury prevents, including
churches, productivity, craftsmanship, “the child in the womb,” love, sex. Usury, for
Pound, is “CONTRA NATURAM”—”Corpses are set to banquet / at behest of usura.”
Usury doesn’t only stand in the way of peace, it stands against the right way of things—
generating enormous confusion in simple things. This confusion necessitates definition,
and definition, in Pound, necessitates fascism. Pound frequently writes about how so few
people can see through the murk of usury, which produces both bad government and
economic disenfranchisement:
and when bad government prevailed, like an arrow,
fog rose from the marshland
bringing claustrophobia of the mist
beyond the stockade there is chaos and nothingness
(C.LXXX.520)
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 77
In Poundian political philosophy, totalitarianism (=Mussolini), defines this confusion and
clears up its muck.
The question in thinking about the formal connections between Mussolini as
hypertext and Pound’s Cantos is, What about Il Duce appealed to him? As he writes in
Guide to Kulchur, perhaps the most widely read of Pound’s critical writings from the late
30’s, when he was living in fascist Italy full-time, Italian totalitarianism provides order.
Pound’s theory of government is based on his interpretation of Confucian principles,
which in themselves could be seen as proto-fascist in their focus on defining good
government as a leader’s total (but ethical) control of his nation. Pound opens his Guide
with a digest of the Confucian analects, and closes his earlier, explicitly fascist book of
criticism—Jefferson And/Or Mussolini—with a similar, but shorter digestion. The focus
in Jefferson is on the ways Jefferson and Mussolini, two leaders who Pound sees as
analogous to one another (howbeit with some crucial differences), achieve supreme
order. He ends the book: “Towards which I assert again my own firm believe that the
Duce will not stand with despots and the lovers of power but with the lovers of / ORDER
/ τ καλν” (J/M 128). Pound throughout the book makes a distinction between leaders
who are driven by power, and those driven by order. In the second bracket he lists Lenin,
Mussolini, and Jefferson, and sees them as leaders who act based on “facts” and who, in a
Gentilean mode,
32
can immediately transform those facts into action.
32
In his writing, Pound never references Gentile, though twice in Jefferson And/Or
Mussolini he obscurely references an Italian thinker named “G” whose arguments bear
resemblance to Gentile’s. No direct link can be established between the two, other than to
say that, as I demonstrated in the second chapter, by virtue of Gentile’s power and
ubiquity in the Mussolini regime, Pound must have encountered his ideas. But Pound’s
forgoing any acknowledgement of Gentile is keeping with his citational practices—
except for a few intellectuals, friends, and historical figures, he only occasionally cites
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 78
The FACT is the essential item in Pound’s reading of history and its impact on the
present, but most facts are obscured by preconceptions. “It takes a genius charged with
some form of dynamite, mental or material, to blast [the common man] out of these
preconceptions.” And for Pound, as Perelman’s essay points out, the genius is the rare
individual who can achieve a Confucian utopia, who can instantly perceive “the
unassailable formula, the exact distribution” of the economics that will make this utopia
possible (J/M 26). Mussolini is this creative genius, capable of instant perception of facts
and subsequent action; Mussolini is not only a political leader, not only a world-maker,
but an artist: “Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything
save the artist and you will get muddled with contradictions” (J/M 34). And Mussolini as
artifex is also a DEBUNKER, a virtual superhuman who discredits 500 lies a morning,
and who continues to drive things—res publica—into order: “The secret of the Duce is
possibly the capacity to pick out the element of immediate and major importance in any
tangle; or, in the case of a man, to go straight to the centre, for the fellow’s major
interest.” (J/M 66). In Pound’s writing, Mussolini is the same multi-purpose, multi-
valiant, demi-god seated at the intersection of multiple discourses the fascist regime
sought to construct in its propaganda, as I made clear in the previous chapter. He is an
artist, historian, leader, economist, even scientist, because scientists, like fascists, “are
interested in the WORK being done and the work TO DO, and not in personal
considerations, personal petty vanities and so on” (J/M 68). The textual figure inter-
penetrated by, and inter-penetrating, the variegated strains of Italian and world history in
anyone by name, usually referring to them by a letter or by a vague description of them as
a famous person. It is a formal move on Pound’s part, I think, that enables him to seem
less indebted to the ideas of others’, especially those he perhaps only half-agrees with, as
I suspect is the case of Gentile.
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 79
Pound is in near total agreement with fascist propaganda. When he writes in Guide to
Kulchur
Mussolini [is] a great man, demonstrably in his effects on event,
unadvertisedly so in the swiftness of mind, in the speed with which his
real emotion is shown in his face, so that only a crooked man cd.
misinterpret his meaning and his basic intention[,]
fascist propaganda and Pound’s writing are nearly identical. Like the fascists, Pound
writes that Italy was in a crisis of system, rather than of politics, and Mussolini was the
only “genius … to see and repeatedly affirm” the fact of it (GK 186). And as a genius, as
an artifex (and, I might add, as an artifice), only Mussolini could construct and be
constructed as the solution to this crisis.
The degree to which Pound’s fascism is transcribed into his poetics is clearest
when he valorizes poetry as better than prose because “there is MORE in and on two
pages of poetry than in or on ten pages of any prose save the few books that rise above
classification as anything save exceptions” (GK 121). In this passage, Pound writes that
poetry is totalitarian, and in this regard resembles (or can resemble) Mussolini’s political
project. Not only is Mussolini a superhuman, he is a poem, a mode of discourse, one that
Pound explicitly analogizes to his own creative work. Pound writes in Jefferson that
Mussolini affected not only physical accomplishments, like the drainage of the swamps
in the south, but was also “AN AWAKENED INTELLIGENCE in the nation and a new
LANGUAGE in the debates in the chamber” (J/M 73). Mussolini is both the tale of the
tribe and the tribe itself. He is a language. He is the writer who writes a living poem out
of a population, a totalitarian poetics not limited to written and spoken language, but
nonetheless constituting a text—a thing to be read, a set of meanings to be solved in
equations Mussolini himself could rapidly understand:
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 80
it was exhilarating to talk to him, as it would be exhilarating to be in a
cage full of leopards. As he is not initially either a writer or a painter this
has often been hard to explain. He was the first man I ever met who
seemed to me to have ANY capacity for dealing with abstract ideas, or,
still better, his mind moved instantly from a given phenomenon to the
general equation under which one would ultimately have to group it. (J/M
92).
Pound couldn’t have known that his “talks” with Mussolini, however imaginative and
brief the one most scholars have confirmed was, would eventually lead him to an actual
cage, and yet Pound intuited that support for Mussolini was an extremely dangerous trap
when he metaphorized his experience in zoological terms. Despite Pound’s own
brilliance, which he often emphasized in his professorly criticism, for him Mussolini’s
own intelligence is superior to everyone. But Il Duce was not exhilarated by Pound, even
though Pound was exhilarated by Il Duce.
Pound implicitly agrees with fascist propaganda when he figures Mussolini as not
simply a man, but rather as a text—an individual to be read and heard; interpreted for
literal and symbolic meaning, much like a book. In the opening of Jefferson And/Or
Mussolini, Pound criticizes Dante for his famous tiered system of meaning (the literal, the
allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical), but perhaps that very poetics Pound
mocks could be viewed as an analog to the ways he and the fascists interpreted Il Duce.
Mussolini literally drained the swamps, but allegorically he drained the metaphysical
abscess that had built up in Italy since the Middle Ages; tropologically he cleared the
moral morass out of Italian consciousness, accumulated from years of fiscal and social
watering down of the Roman heritage; and anagogically Mussolini gave birth to a new
world order. Il Duce’s actions, which are always the instant results of his understanding
of facts, suggests also a knowledge-component for Pound and the fascists, a two-part
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 81
meaning that requires a four-part interpretative apparatus to grasp. And in this image of
Mussolini, one that reflects his status as a figure interpenetrated by variegated media and
histories, and one that in turn acted on those same media and histories, Pound found both
an artist and a work of art. Bob Perelman agrees,
Seen through the lens of Pound’s faith, Mussolini the artifex, the artist of
the State, was a genius—a union of utter acuity and irresistible force who
perceived multiple perspectives instantly and had only to pronounce his
clear and powerful word to create social value, a new language, and a new
world (Perelman 29).
This Mussolini, Il Duce as the artist of history, is first present in Canto XLI, which
opens with his response to A Draft of XXX Cantos. Pound takes the Boss’s
33
glance at
the poems and quick response (“this is entertaining”) as evidence of his supreme genius,
not as his simple ignorance of English or ambivalence to Pound’s work. Pound moves
quickly from Mussolini’s reaction to the Cantos to the drainage of the swamps,
MA QVESTO,”
said the Boss, “è divertente.”
catching the point before the aesthetes had got
there;
Having drained off the muck by Vada
from the marshes, by Cicero, where no one else wd. have
drained it.
Waited 2000 years, ate grain from the marshes;
Water supply for ten million, another one million “vani
that is rooms for people to live in.
XI of our era.
Having defeated the land, Mussolini faces the equally difficult challenge of fending off
“the potbellies” seeking their share of the financial gain:
That they were to have a consortium
and one of the potbellies says:
will come in for 12 million”
33
The “Boss” was one of Pound’s favorite nicknames for Mussolini.
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 82
And another: three millyum for my cut;
34
And another: we will take eight;
And the Boss said: but what will you
DO with that money?”
The argument continues, and Mussolini stands by his question a second time, adding:
“You won’t really need all that money / because you are for the confine.” And so, as
Perelman has glossed, action and language combined in a single spoken word (confine),
and the men are pushed out of the frame of the poem, confined to the nothingness of the
space outside the poem—”magically quarantined” (Perelman 71).
Pound’s Mussolini functions similarly to Gentile’s, occupying a central place in
Italian culture, interpenetrated and penetrating its various discourses. And Mussolini as
this figure of discourse, like the others that people the poem, remains a thread (however
thinned) until the end, even though the epic-focus of the poem shifts after the Pisan
Cantos. In one of the last cantos, Pound, who no longer places Mussolini as emblematic
of good government, still privileges the totalitarian leader, the individual genius
dominating and making culture, as the source of good government: “The whole tribe is
from one man’s body, / what other way can you think of it?” (C 99). Taken with Pound’s
characterization of the Cantos as “the tale of the tribe,” these two lines elide him with
34
Pound most frequently uses dialect to condescend. Moneylenders, Jews, idiot
Americans and their World War II allies often speak in dialect, while Mussolini and
Kung and other “heroes” of the poem speak with both clarity and calm. Perelman, who is
especially sensitive to Pound’s use of dialect (much more so than any other commentator
I’ve read), writes, “As the Cantos progresses, accent, especially if ‘Jewish,’ will be a sign
of moral decay” (Perelman 66). As with the case of the famous “pull down thy vanity”
passage in Canto LXXXI, Morrison writes that Pound’s dialect and address is often
misunderstood. In his reading, the “thy” doesn’t refer to Pound, as is often argued, but to
the blacks soldiers guarding him. Morrison thoroughly parses the various lines as a
complex system of puns that is, in fact, critical of the racially integrated U.S. army
(Morrison 42-43).
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 83
Mussolini, Sigismundo, Kung, Adams, all of the heroes of the Cantos—emphasizing the
individual capable of making and remaking civil society in his image and his language.
And the Poundian hero, as Perelman writes, is always half between action and words, a
figure whose speech is a punctual (puncturing) act, not a discourse” (Perelman 61).
Numerous individuals appear in the Cantos as capable of this kind of puncturing act, but
Sigismundo is the hero who most obviously resembles Mussolini, and in many ways who
reflects Pound’s idealized image of Il Duce.
The eighth canto is the first to feature Sigismundo Malatesta, the mercenary ruler
of Rimini (1417 – 1468) who built the Tempio Malatesta, and who then figures as the
poem’s hero for much of the first thirty cantos (Terrell 37). Pound’s interest in
Sigismundo begins with his patronage program, which he hoped Mussolini would
recycle—and, in fact, the character of Sigismundo is modeled after Mussolini. Perelman
writes: “Malatesta is a forerunner of the Boss with all the proper attributes: he has daring,
panache, and a passion for construction; he treats artists well and is ‘a male of the
species,’ as Pound said of Mussolini” (Perelman 34). Sigismuno was appointed by the
Pope, after a long series of conflicts that installed him as one of the most powerful
leaders in northern Italy. Pound first visited Rimini in 1922, five months before the
publication of Eliot’s Waste Land, which Pound references in the opening line of the
poem, and saw the Tempio Malatestiano, a cathedral Sigismundo spent his life funding. It
was at this time that Pound first encountered the Fascists, whose rule was still limited to
Northern Italy. In addition to being a powerful autocrat with a strong patronage program,
Sigismundo was a poet, and canto eight quotes some fragmentary verse (translated by
Pound) in praise of his mistress (Terrell 38). Importantly, Pound’s image of an ideal
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 84
leader always involves his patronage of the arts, and stresses Pound’s own conviction that
statecraft could only be perfected in a society with a healthy arts culture in place.
Sigismundo, like Mussolini in 1922, is a creative leader who faces enormous opposition
(“With the church against him, / With the Medici bank for itself”) who nevertheless
overcomes the forces standing in the way of progress in order to not only create good
government, but to create a culture of masterful art—emblematized in the Tempio, the
construction of which is the subject of the ninth canto.
Lawrence Rainey writes in his essay “‘All I Want to Do Is to Follow the Orders’:
History, Faith, and Fascism in the Early Cantos” that Sigismundo became a paradigmatic
model for Pound’s other heroes. This slightly oversimplifies Sigismundo and his peers in
the poem, but Rainey’s argument is helpful in that it proposes a reading of the early
Renaissance dictator as a hypertextual figure, much like Mussolini. Pound, in
Sigismundo, first tests his compositional strategy of introducing real life figures as epic
heroes in order to explore examples of nearly virtuous governments and their leaders as
an image for the present. Sigismundo differs from the others in that his abilities are
slightly more supernatural, and, as Rainey argues, resemble less a governmental program
based on abstract principles of managing human behavior (Kung) or realist responses to
the political and natural wilderness of a new world (Adams), than a Roman augury:
Sigismondo reads [events] through the prism of history, interprets [their]
significance for the present, and transforms [them] into a guide for
conduct in the future, doing so in a way that lends interpretation a
performative dimension within the ‘present’ of the text, turns it into a an
exhortation to resolute action in the face of an overwhelmingly hostile
reality. (Rainey 65)
Sigismundo is a leader much like Mussolini, Pound’s boss, translating his understanding
of events (most of which are occluded by preconception) into action that has a real
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 85
impact on the way the world functions. But as Pound’s criticism stresses, Adams (and
Jefferson) and Kung (a figure Morrison compares to Mussolini [37]) factor equally into
Mussolini, whether—as Pound is careful to observe—Mussolini is aware of it or not.
While aspects of Sigismundo resemble Il Duce, I think the more apt reading of the
Renaissance ruler would be as a still-born Mussolini, one incapable of installing himself
at the center of Italian culture (and world culture) because of too many external forces,
including a divided peninsula. Mussolini, in Pound’s writing, more resembles all three of
the central figures of the early cantos: Adams, Kung, and Sigismundo, embodying the
central characteristics of all of them—intelligence, strength against wilderness/disorder,
and a natural propensity for good government. In this sense, all of the figures in the first
half of the book join to form Il Duce.
It’s no surprise that these heroes of the early cantos would resemble Mussolini:
after all, Pound revised the opening of the poem after 1922 into what we have today (the
originals were written in the 1910s, and published in 1917 in Poetry), and began to
develop the project further as soon as Mussolini assumed power. While I don’t want to
overemphasize the degree to which Mussolini’s rise revitalized Pound’s poetic energies
with regard to the Cantos, it certainly activated his political mind, a part of him that was
inseparable from the poetical. After Mussolini became prime minister, Pound introduced
the epic hero strategy, which uses figures and locations from history to conceptualize a
potential for good government in the present, to make a “painted paradise” for readers—
however complicated that image might be (as I will discuss more later). In many ways,
Mussolini is not only a possible impetus behind the poem, he is a formal model—a figure
penetrated and penetrating, punctured and puncturing discourse and history through
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 86
action, figuration, and language who is “read” much in the way one reads a book: a
poem, in a sense, much like Pound’s Cantos. While Mussolini functioned as a living
hypertext, Pound’s Cantos operate with a similar stress on its own position as central
point at which numerous threads converge, unite, overwrite, and connect. (Pound’s
Cantos are so much like a hypertext that several websites online provide various cantos
as hyperlinked to the source material, historical and art data, that the poem refers to.)
Like a hypertext, which highlights moments within a discourse and allows a viewer to
temporarily (or not) defer and redirect their reading to another text, I argue that the
Cantos, in privileging Mussolini via direct representation of him as Il Duce and as the
other historical figures who are frequently (but not always) analogized to him, Pound
demonstrates a formal interest in Mussolini—not as man or political leader, but as text: a
poem to be read into/from history.
But the death of Mussolini, of one of the models of the Cantos, created a crisis in
Pound’s composition practice. In addition to his imprisonment at the DTC, the possibility
of execution as a traitor to the United States and the likelihood of imprisonment and
public embarrassment precipitated a major emotional breakdown in Pound. Whether he
went insane (as he said he did) or not is discussion beyond the scope of this paper
(though Richard Sieburth provides a nice summary of the doctors’ reports in his
introduction to the Pisan Cantos
35
), but it can be said with some certainty that Pound
began to seriously rethink his poetics in light of the end of the war. Pound wrote to
William Carlos Williams on March 31
st
, 1946: “(of course here there has been no
35
Sieburth: “Army psychiatrists argued that Pound displayed ‘no paranoia, delusions nor
hallucinations,’ and there was ‘no evidence of psychosis, neurosis or psychopath,” while
Pound maintained that detention (which he referred to as a “lesion”) “had caused him a
‘violent terror and hysteria’ [that had] resulted in ‘a complete loss of memory” (XIV).
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 87
cataclasm & there can be no understanding until a whole new means of communication is
built up—neath which weight I am crushed = I mean need of creating it.)” (P/W 222).
Following the war, and the death of Mussolini, the LANGUAGE that had authored the
previous two decades, and that had helped to author Pound’s poetics, was gone. The loss
of Il Duce meant that Pound had to re-strategize his composition away from the epic
hero-focus that privileged Mussolini and his government, but not before a meditation on
loss in the Pisan Cantos. While those poems are sometimes read as an elegy for
Mussolini, or an absolution of Pound’s faith in fascism, I would argue that the poems
elegize themselves, lamenting not only the loss of Mussolini, but of their own formal
directive. In the next few pages I hope to provide a cursory look into moments in the
Pisan Cantos that showcase the degree to which Mussolini was affected by the death of
Mussolini, and the ways this death impacted Pound’s thinking about his own poem’s
direction.
Sieburth writes that the “myth” of the collapse of the poet’s mind and of
Mussolini’s Italy is crucial to “an understanding of how the poem stages its theater of
memory—and of forgetting” (Sieburth XV). The trauma of the “cataclasm”—of the loss
of Mussolini and Pound’s own directive—is both dramatized and reenacted from the
beginning of the sequence. Canto LXXIV opens with the image of an “enormous tragedy
of the dream” slung over the back of a peasant, and progresses with jolts of language,
reference, and mournfulness that underscore the cataclysmic loss. The elegiac quality of
the sequence is first obvious when Pound writes: “Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano / by
the heels at Milano,” referring to the execution and trampling of Mussolini and his wife
by Milanese partisans. Having spent much of the past twenty years involved in
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 88
Mussolini’s Italy, the brutality of their death must have shocked and horrified Pound. Not
only did the world he had placed so much faith in collapse, but the author of that world
did too. He invokes Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” but offers his own experience—and the
world’s—as a correction to Eliot’s poem’s end (“This is the way the world ends / Not
with a bang but a whimper”):
. . . but the twice crucified
where in history will you find it?
yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper
with a bang not with a whimper,
To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.
(C LXXIV. 433)
The city of Dioce—Pound’s idealized image of the city as utopia—will not be built in
Europe, there will be no terraces “the colour of stars.” The utopian possibilities have
finally been destroyed. The potential for the West to swerve out from under capitalism
had been removed. Pound’s own poem has been turned on its head: whereas before he
highlights the corrupted histories of the past in order to understand the present and offer a
possible way out of it, now his poem is forced to contain, even be bludgeoned by the
contemporary disaster of history. Power, rather than order, has won: “woe to them that
conquer with armies / and whose only right is their power” (C LXXIV.483). The painted
paradise is smashed.
36
For Pound the emergent future will not be any better than what the
past has had to offer: “militarism progressing westward / im Westen nichts neues / and
the Constitution in jeopardy / and that state of things not very new either[.]” Already the
focus of the poem’s historiographical praxis has shifted—away from cooler analysis of
36
. For the rest of the Cantos, Pound expresses doubt as to whether or not a utopian
project is possible in poetry, culminating in the final section, where he writes “The
dreams clash / and are shattered—/ and that I tried to make a paradiso / terrestre” (C
Notes for XXVII et seq.822).
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 89
cause and effect, to a near frantic fear that history is turning against Pound—“when the
raft broke and the waters went over me” (C LXXX.533).
Even though a grander “larceny” than he expected had overrun Italy (C
LXXIV.455), Pound remains defiant, and encodes his continuing hope for Dioce in the
opening poem of the Pisan Cantos. The world he has placed his faith in has disappeared,
but Pound’s refuses to give up on a utopian future
300 years culture at the mercy of a tack hammer
thrown thru the roof
Cloud over mountain, mountain over the cloud
I surrender neither the empire nor the temples
plural
nor the constitution nor yet the city of Dioce
(C LXXIV.454)
While Pound had expected the path to Dioce would begin with Mussolini, it’s removal
from possibility doesn’t necessarily exclude the potential for another to emerge. Pound
continues to struggle with Mussolini’s failure to stem the tide, and many of these poems
vacillate between hope and despair for the future, creating an anxiety about the efficacy
of poetry that ultimately forces him to change the direction of the poems, away from
fascism and the historical figures that underwrite his image of Mussolini, to a more
nuanced, fragmentary approach to history—to paradise.
Canto LXXIV, like others in the sequence, moves quickly through Pound’s
politics, history, personal experience, overheard speech,
37
and languages. Inside this
37
The disembodied quality of the terse, colloquial language is jarring, as it must have
been for Pound in his “gorilla cage.” Throughout the sequence this kind of speech—
taunting, indifferent, comforting—cycles in, disrupting the flow of Pound’s voice with
those who are imprisoning him. When the poems digress on history and other “outside”
forces, they are returned to the cage, where Pound first began to draft the sequence. The
prisoners’ speech is one way that Pound begins to bid goodbye to fascist Italy, buffering
much of his political and historical flourishes. The language is often rough, spoken by
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 90
complex matrix of historical, political, and personal references, which often go
unfinished or are cobbled together with other thoughts and parts of speech, Pound
presents and reenacts the experience of living in the American DTC. After a brief passage
commenting on Ugolino, opaque references to friends and historical figures, then Eliot,
Pound writes: “I don’t know how humanity can stand it / with a painted paradise at the
end of it / without a painted paradise at the end of it[.]” In the aftermath of the war, which
so unseated Pound’s vision of the future, the possibility of both the availability and
unavailability of the painted paradise is present in the poems. The presence is two-fold.
As I wrote earlier, Pound seems to valorize “painted paradise” as positive. But there also
seems to be a discomfort at the thought of an artificial image before humanity, and
therefore an illusion. This must have been particularly difficult for a man animated by the
urge to translate ideas into action, who’s poetic and critical career was designed in part to
invoke action through artifice, hence Pound’s complex valorization of the artificial image
of utopia seems to rupture in the Pisan Cantos, opening up the possibility of its existence
and inexistence. If humanity were driven toward (and by) an artificial paradise (cosmic or
utopian) that may or may not be there, the war would have been totally futile. Pound,
who opposed war, supported Mussolini largely out of a hope that fascism would bring
about a better, non-capitalist world. The loss of this world seems to throw Pound into
serious doubt as to the effectiveness of poetry, and of challenging the capitalist system
and its endless wars, even if he is certain of the rightness of his convictions. As he
emphatically ends Canto LXXVIII: “there / are / no / righteous / wars.”
who seem as interested in teasing him as they are in helping him. Pound cruelly refers to
them as “shades.”
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 91
While the collapse of the fascist world was unbearable for Pound, he nevertheless
acknowledges the need to accept this end. However, the experience of the camp affects
Pound such that he introduces a new, more deeply personal layer to the Cantos. In Canto
83, he writes in a near chant:
Nor can who has passed a month in the death cells
believe in capital punishment
No man who has passed a month in the death cells
believes in cages for beasts
(C LXXXIII.550)
This canto is noticeably calm, especially as it prepares the reader for the final poem in the
sequence, where Pound salutes Mussolini and the other fascists. Its rhythmic flow is less
interrupted, and stabilizes to a degree of serenity. He writes, “There is a fatigue as deep
as the grave,” and later, following a digression on a peacock dinner in Sussex, “well those
days are gone forever” (C LXXXIII.553-4). Pound’s poetic logic frequently reroutes the
meaning of one digression to account for another, calling attention to historical likeness,
similarity, or difference; here it is easy to imagine that “those days” refer to the pre-war,
when Pound was most buoyant about the prospects of a better world, when a dinner of
this kind could be enjoyed. In his cage, nothing could be farther away. Pound’s
hypertextual impulse isn’t lost even as its living analog is, rather it shifts its focus toward
elegy, constantly redirecting the reader to the immediate past, the causes of the
destruction of fascist Italy (the poem is overwhelmed with names, quotes, and allusions
to various Allied persons), and to Pound’s own experience of the end of the war.
The final poem of the sequence, Canto 84, bids farewell to Mussolini and the
fascist world. The tone of the poems gradually shifts in the latter half of the Pisan Cantos;
the calmness of defeat becomes an element of the sequence, until finally Canto LXXXIV,
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 92
in which Pound signals the end of his elegy for Mussolini by bidding him a complicated,
multi-valiant farewell:
Under white clouds, cielo di Pisa
out of all this beauty something must come
O moon my pin-up,
chronometer
Wei, Chi and Pi-kan
Yin had these three men full of humanitas (blood)
or jên
2
Xaire Alessandro
Xaire Fernando, e il Capo,
Pierre, Vidkun,
Henriot
(C LXXIV.559)
“Il Capo”—“the head”—refers to Mussolini. Ronald Bush characterizes the moment as a
“bitter farewell” (117), but he seems to miss the other potential meanings of Pound’s use
of “xaire,” meanings I think he intended to be multiple and elusive. “Xaire” presents an
interesting tripling of meaning, as it can refer to hello (which doesn’t seem to be Pound’s
meaning), goodbye, and rejoice. Taking the last two as Pound’s intention, the defiance of
the end is clearest: as Pound bids Mussolini goodbye, he rejoices in him, suggesting that
these men were “full of humanitas (blood).” But this concluding celebratory farewell to
Mussolini is brief. Pound, unlike many others, has survived, and must return to his own
defeat, recording a conversation between Italians who discuss the Americans he heard
“thru the barbed wire.” The conversation is notable because it suggests that Pound might
beginning to soften his position toward his home country.
38
Pound approaches the
conclusion of the poem by quoting the famous muckraker Lincoln Steffens. He begins
38
“And then I said to the shepherdess of pigs: Are these Americans? Do they conduct
themselves well? And she said: A Little. A Little, a little. And I said: Better than the
Germans? And she said: Sort of.” (C LXXIV.560. Tr. Durbin).
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 93
with a conversation between Italians “you can, said Stef (Lincoln Steffens) / do nothing
with revolutionaries / until they are at the end of their tether.” The question, for me, is
how serious Pound’s tone is regarding Steffens. Pound has certainly demonstrated
throughout the poems that he is “at the end of his tether,” but the question remains (for
him, certainly) what that change will look like.
The death of Mussolini raises the question as to how Pound had to re-strategize
his poem after the war. While the cantos that follow the Pisan Cantos aren’t totally
dissimilar from those before them, there is a difference of approach that allows the book
to be divided somewhat between the Mussolini cantos and the post-Mussolini cantos,
especially as the poems move toward an increasingly fragmentary state. The historical
perspective, and the stability of the various speakers, becomes increasingly jolting, until
finally most of what Pound offers as a canto is broken language and Chinese characters.
On the page, the poems are less crowded with language. Pound’s commitment to
exploring the political and historical within the framework of poetry remains in tact, but
much of the politics remains considerably less polemical—or, at least, less obviously
disagreeable. The impulse to include (and refer back to) everything is the same, but the
drive toward a specific end is less clear, and the poem eventually lacks a singular thesis.
The hypertextual qualities of the poem no longer seem influenced by Mussolini, and the
links between discourses, cultural milieu, other texts seem more tenuous or broken off.
The focus, more generally, seems to be toward lyric beauty than a history of the world.
If this paper were longer, I would include an analysis of every book of the Cantos
following the Pisan Cantos so as to fully test my theory, but space is limited. I hope the
conclusions I draw about Mussolini and Pound suggest one possible reading of the
III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 94
influence one had on the other, and how that influence impacted Pound’s process and
thinking in the Cantos. It seems that a sequel to this paper would be an analysis of the
later cantos change their approach to history, and how the underlying praxis is affected
by the death of Mussolini. Whether or not Pound consciously constructed the Cantos as a
textual analog to Mussolini isn’t very clear in Pound’s writing, though I think there are
tacit admissions of Pound’s indebtedness throughout his work. While I certainly have
thoughts on Section: Rock-Drill De Los Cantares, Thrones de los Cantares, and the final
book, I hoped in this thesis to provide only a groundwork for later readings. My goal has
been to raise questions among possibilities, and to investigate potential sites where these
possibilities seem to be realized. I hope ending on a (brief) look at the Pisan Cantos, and
the way Pound was dramatically impacted by the death of Mussolini, might raise the
question as to how Pound’s poetics changed after the devastating death of Mussolini.
How does Pound rethink his praxis after its living analog is dead? The numerous ways in
which they did seem obvious to me, but in a Poundian pedagogical move, I’ll have to
leave it to the reader to discover them his or herself.
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 95
IV
Ez nd Ends
Letter 1
Standing back of the line that divides you from me, I’m not sure if I want to
extend my hand to you. When I read you, you were never there, or you were there in the
shadows and refused to come out, only ever standing half in the light. Now that you’ve
arrived, I don’t know what to do, only what to say—even if in addressing you in front of
a group of readers I’ve done nothing more than ask them to adjust their seat in the
audience, to trade front row for the nosebleed, while you take their place and I remain on
stage. Of course, as you might point out, that’s not an entirely honest image of this final
chapter, that a truer portrait would acknowledge that the Ezra Pound I’m writing to is not
Ezra Pound the man or even Ezra Pound the poet, but rather is a distorted image of you,
one I’ve twisted such that you now resemble me. The “you,” which you never took much
interest in but has become an essential element of my own poetics, an isolated moment of
“us” as group and individual elided into a singular linguistic character—a figure of
individuals made to cohere as object an “I” addresses. For now I’ll stand here as that “I,”
and you’ll sit there as “you,” and we can be individuated in language as such so as to
make sense of this letter. But sooner or later, all of us will have to admit that there is no
Ezra Pound here, there’s only us, and the images of ourselves and others we’ve generated
out of text, into text. But before that I might stick my hand in your pocket to pull out a
poem I wrote. I might say to you, and to those sitting above us, “I don’t think we’ve met
before, but I recognize you.”
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 96
Your identity continuously complicated this project because you wanted, despite
your endless assurances of your clarity of thought and direction, to be complicated, a
figure between, within, and as a multitude of discourses—politics, poetics, histories, and
geographies. Your escape any attempt to recognize you as an isolated element, but as one
interconnected and interconnecting an indefinite series of other elements. I tried to pin
you down, but no fixed point, or point moving between fixed points, would suit you. As
poet in the afterlife of an epic tradition, reinventing a poetic model that seemed ill-suited
to the war, interwar, and postwar chaos of the first half of the twentieth century. Homer
wrote in order to explain the origins of their societies, the disparate threads that were
made to cohere into a single national or cultural identity. Virgil complicated that model
by introducing a degree of self-consciousness to the tradition, to the act of constructing a
narrative at the request of power. You re-imagined the epic as many things, but
importantly as a work that could realize the Homeric, the Virgilian, and the Catullan—a
textual object that could construct (or correct) community as much as it could emerge out
of it.
So what were you doing in Italy? Trying to find what out of your times? Having
read the Cantos in full twice, and parts of it many more times, I’m still trying to
understand what what is. The hard surface of the poem occasionally cracks, lets the light
of it escape (a favorite metaphor of yours—one that the poet Bob Perelman, a poet I
respect but whose writing seems fraught with too much personal disgust over the politics
of his poetic lineage makes a great deal of in his book Trouble with Genius) and get into
the eyes of the reader. It’s gotten into my eyes, but I can’t figure out what to do. I’m
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 97
trying to figure you out, Ezra. I think, having written and read you and about you, and the
political context that produced you, I’ve come close.
Love,
Andrew
*
xample: I remember first hearing a recording of a selection of Jackson Mac
Low’s Words nd Ends for Ez in the late winter, when I’d just started this
project, but had no idea what to write. In the unheated room I listened to Mac
Low approximate Pound’s voice through Pound’s own words, reduce him to the most
basic language, determined by a chance procedure that omits most words from the
original text, except those that, once a letter is capitalized, spell out “Ezra Pound.” It’s a
procedure that seems to me to be profoundly elegiac, a melancholy erasure of E.P.’s
sense and its occasionally toxic poetics in favor of a fragmentary language that
nevertheless spells him out. It’s witchcraft, a counter-curse. A cure. I could see my breath
as I sat still, waiting for the moment when the power of the performance would click.
Twenty seconds: click. I don’t think Mac Low is being esoteric or unfair to Pound, in fact
he loved Pound, but in erasing him he performs an operation that simultaneously reduces
Pound to his best and worst attributes: the enormous, uncontrolled ego that dominates his
work in the repeated permutations of his name, and the crystalline lyricism that almost
always, even when Pound is attempting a literalism, is fragmentary, abstract, and
beautiful. Words nd Ends for Ez breaks Pound down, tells his work as language rather
than politics, obfuscates the politics of the Cantos as truly secondary, even non-existent:
What lies beneath but a shattered paradise that cannot cohere? Mac Low reforms the
Cantos in the only way he can, not through an academic operation on intent, meaning,
E
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 98
and context (in and out of excuse or not), but through reduction, reviving him as a
performance in language. Mac Low spoke across the computer speakers not as himself,
but as Pound, or a vision of Pound, re:vision of practice that unhinged me, withdrew out
of me my own version of Pound as a mirror image of my own ambitions: a poet I came to
at eleven, wanted to be, and later rejected only to find that his work is absolutely essential
to my own, and I too had to operate on him in order to rehabilitate him and isolate what’s
of him in me. The point, I realized, isn’t to read Words nd Ends, which I’d tried in the
past but found I couldn’t “get into it,” though of course reading works too, but to hear
Mac Low read Pound, to generate out of such a fraught, yet demanding text another, one
of fresher intent, a channel into the past. That’s what we do when we write—and read.
And through Mac Low I met Pound.
oom: Then there was Arthur Wood, who lives at the end of Downing St. in
the Bedford-Stuyvesant, my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. On the red door
of his building, which looks either like a church or castle made of wood, he’s
painted the words “Broken Angel.” The building wasn’t build to “code,” and so the city,
which has spent the past several decades gentrifying and normalizing the outer
neighborhoods, has tried to condemn the building. It’s almost impossible to imagine
Broken Angel in the city, but it’s there.
Z
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 99
(Figure 11)
When my friend and I walked down the street, which stops at his place before making a
left, it almost felt like the house wasn’t there before we’d started walking toward it, but
was sprung from the city spontaneously. A sign next to the door tells you to pull the rope
hanging in front of it and to wait for Arthur. My friend who took me to visit him, but who
had never seen him himself, had me pull the cord. Neither of us expected a man to
emerge from a window overhead, but one did. He told us he’d come right down. When he
came out of the house, he shook ours hands, introduced himself as Arthur, and told us
about the various battles he’d fought and semi-won against city building codes, public
officials, judges, lawyers, and mayors. He told us that only last week he’d spoken before
the Obama administration at the United Nations, which had offered to take up his case
before a world court. The room of mirrors at the top of the house was removed by the
city, but the rest has been allowed to stay. Arthur described it to me as a place where you
could go and see the city in all its angles. When an airplanes flies overhead, it’s projected
all over the room, appearing as though it’s going in multiple directions at once. I find this
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 100
room that no longer exists to be such an appealing image right now because it reminds
me so much of the Cantos. Both appropriate images, refract them, project them into your
space, and steep you in their curious, but confusing beauty. They both stand on top of a
huge body of work, build by a single individual opposed to normative culture’s standards
of design, and both Wood and Pound struggle with invisible, but worldly conspirators.
imini, where the Tempio is, where Pound first met the fascists, and
rethought the Cantos as Mutholini assumed power as prime minister.
and the front of the Tempio, Rimini
It will not take uth twenty yearth
to cwuth Mutholini
and the economic war has begun
35 via Balbo
For Pound, as I mentioned before, dialect is most often used to parody or humiliate the
opposition. But this particular use has an added layer that is less common in Pound, and
one that is suggestive of how he viewed Mussolini as himself a poetics. Within the
anonymous speaker, Pound couches a critique of Il Duce’s critics in Mussolini’s name,
approximating the dialect speech pattern of the critic with an obvious nod to the Greek
word µθος, which can be parsed to mean myth, story, or narrative. Pound uses the
anonymous speaker’s dismissal of Mussolini against him or her, underscoring his earlier,
complex pedagogical point in Guide to Kulchur that we can know anything instantly as
soon as we remove the misperceptive faculties, those mental abilities that for Pound force
ordinary citizens to misunderstand the world through false or teleological histories
propagated by those interested in creating a false image of history. In this moment,
misperception of a fact shows within the speech of the speaker his or her understanding,
R
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 101
even if s/he doesn’t realize it. Mussolini is the tale of the tribe of everyone for Pound, and
he emphasizes it by revising Mussolini’s name to include the Greek for myth or story.
Out of one man, the tribe. For me this is an amazingly virtuosic moment, one that
showcases not only Pound’s curious politics and his endless desire to outwit those who
disagreed with him, but also, whatever my disagreement with his fascism, his unique
approach to language as a thing unto itself, a mode of communication that itself is
hypertextual: an Italian name spoken by an English speaker with a lisp revised to include
a Greek word, a conglomeration that seems to point not only to the unified nature of the
line or its meaning, but also to the meanings that it borrows, revises, and is composed of.
poetics begins in community: maybe.
A poetics begins with the individual in community: certainly.
A poetics begins in the Idaho Territory, continues to New York,
Pennsylvania, London, Paris, Italy, DTC, through correspondence, interaction, jobs,
poems, positioning, arguing, drinking, meeting, going in many directions—the wo/man
of twists and turns.
A poetics begins with an “a” because it’s one of many, and if it doesn’t begin with
community, it begins to be community. It is my letter written to you, or you reading my
letter and writing back.
A poetics is an engagement, and we are always / must be engaged.
A
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 102
rojects, even senior projects, raise the point that there are no self-sufficient
objects, individuals, or texts, and everything happens in sequence and,
whether we emphasize the sequence or not, always refers in part to its
interdependence on a variety of sources and antecedents. I wrote this project after reading
Bob Perelman, who impressed me at first as a poet capable of writing about other poets
with rigor of beauty against beauty, not beyond remonstrance to those who had so clearly
influenced him: Modernism of bad politics. When I finally returned to him to write the
previous chapter, I realized he’s only half-right, his anger isn’t as productive as I
remembered, and sometimes even stands in the way of meaningful discourse on
meaningful things. Language, especially the language of others, is an awful thing to
waste, or make waste of without rigor of beauty for beauty, I’d say. We don’t just take
things apart, we put them together in a different way. Or else we go nowhere. So with
Homer we don’t just say No to his antiquity because it can be disagreeable or strange or
unhelpful, we absorb it and begin again, “Then went down the ship,” because nothing,
even bad men, is not worth saving—or rehabilitated. There’s a problem when that
impulse is translated into a pitiful forgiveness or apologia, the palace of academic
crystal’s refusal to admit a crack is a very beautiful thing, and tells us who we are. So
Pound is a fascist who did adore Mussolini, at least for a time, and perhaps even modeled
his strategy of composition after the formal principles that underlie Mussolini as a textual
figure, but that doesn’t make his work worthwhile, even gorgeous, even when it’s
chilling.
Serenely in the crystal jet
as the bright ball that the fountain tosses
(Verlaine) as diamond clearness
How soft the wind under Taishan
P
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 103
where the sea is remembered
out of hell, the pit
out of the dust and glare evil
(C. LXXIV.469)
The ethical procedure is admittance, and revision of opinion that incorporates
acknowledgement of Pound’s wrong words for real events, a nod to the fight against the
hurried capitalism that exploits the poor and seeks war to refund its staggering
“progress,” the problems of Pound’s racist critique, and generate out of that
acknowledgement a new ethical, or as Joan Retallack has called it “poethical,” space for
the work that promotes good out of bad, what I guess you could say is the right way for
the complex, sometimes mean, work to emerge in the new world.
ut of what space, and into what new world? Charles Bernstein, Pierre Joris,
Al Filreis, and Joan Retallack, in discussion at Bard on the Jackson Mac
Low poem I listened to with them, argued through Mac Low arguing
through Pound, generating out of the conversation a new, improvisatory space in which
another, accommodating poetics could be proposed for Mac Low and Pound as well as
those of us in the classroom. By procedurally erasing Pound’s problematic politics in the
Cantos, does Mac Low release Pound from them, draw attention to them through their
absence, or create another work entirely? Probably a combination of the three. Whatever
the outcome of the procedure, the impulse to do it in the first place is relatable. I too
begin to think read Pound with love, but a complex, sometimes tiresome love; not only
am I drawn to him in a kind of fundamental way as poet, I’m repelled by him—a
combined feeling that I suspect Mac Low must have felt for Pound. The desire to erase
him is just as strong as it is to write as him.
O
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 104
oZier’s cuRve he wAll,
Phin hOut exUltant
seeN impiDity,
Exultance,
aZ loR r-
leAf
Paler rOck-
layers at-
Un e deNho ia
“HaD Ever oZzaglio,
e tRacchiolino
iccArdo Psit,
lOve blUer thaN oureD
Euridices,
yZance,
a’s Rest,
use At P”
n Of trUction eraNts
faceD,
E tZ
e FRance
is
LAnnes Pire
fOrces,
a nUisance,
was Napoleon
l 22nd.
Ery iZation.”
deR ed TAlleyrand Political.
e, Orage id Up ter-
Night al-
AnD E yZantines
m pRologo
othAr.
(Mac Low 323)
What remains is a fragmentary poetry of a fragmentary politics, and the only coherent
thread is the sequence of capitalized letters that spell out Pound’s name, while most of the
other words have been clipped or broken off so that they’re meaning is no longer
apparent except in a few cases. For me there is something profoundly melancholy about
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 105
Mac Low’s Pound poems—to see the reduction of the massive Cantos, with all their
referential, opaque power that almost always defers its meaning, reroutes itself, playing
an allusive and elusive game with the reader reduced to a thin, almost spine-like column
of text is haunting, almost spooky in its concision. All of the links are broken except one:
EZRA POUND.
nder: On Pound. Or not exactly under, but between: Between: On Pound.
Over Pound: epanalepsis, literally, “to take up over” but also to repeat for
poignancy. Not again, but again again. Kenneth Koch, under Pound:
Then you shall return to this valley and teach eating
For who hath eaten phooey
Returneth not unto paradise
Dem mudder fuckers doan unnerstan me
Said the Princess Toy Ling A.D. 1922
Dey doan unnerstan nutttin but smut
That was the year the doves fell at Livorgno
(from “Canto CXIII”)
I cringe reading that poem. Maybe I could have been funnier in this project, but I don’t
certainly find Koch’s parody very funny. Pound has already repeated his antecedents, or
an approximation of antecedents, quoting source material, inventing/revising histories,
incorporating overheard language (or language he writes to appear overheard) to be an
Again, what historiography already does. To say a thing that’s happen in such a way so as
to emphasize its happened-ness. History is the same except it repeats everything you say.
Kenneth Koch, between Pound and me. The problem with Koch’s parody is that it only
half-understands Pound, aping his poetry through stereotype: disjunctive lyricism
matched with historical data and dialect, creating out of what’s already such a hard
surface a squishier one, a mattress thrown over concrete. I don’t get it. It’s not funny.
U
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 106
Mac Low, on the other hand, enacts a reading of Pound, doesn’t parody him or
approximate him. Words nd Ends revises Pound to articulate a position on him. For Mac
Low, Pound is a writer who must be revised, not parodied. Koch’s parody offers nothing
NEW, while Mac Low’s revision and repurposing does.
on-linear history, OK. Once I was dating two people at once, just like
Pound did, and when our mutual friend asked me what I thought about my
triangulation, I told him I didn’t think of it that way at all because
triangulation suggests some kind of coherency to the geometry of my relationship.
Coherency suggests a totalized system, one which refers to parts outside itself while
maintaining its whole: what Pound sought his work, like everyone’s, was curiously
programmed against, and the painted paradise he made of it seems to me beautiful
because it’s obviousness only became such when illusion was dropped, and the world
was revealed as a place without Pound at its center. The world is only itself at its center.
So the concluding swerve of the Cantos, away from a categorizing impulse, a totalitarian
drive toward the definition of the affairs of everything in every relation, is about re-
centering the world, which is itself an incoherent system that privileges randomness and
tension, even as it attempts to recycle its parts in a system that appears totalizing: Nature.
But Nature, capital N, doesn’t exist except in us: and Mt. Taishan is in Northern Italy in
the Cantos not as fantasy but because, for Pound, it is. We affect, and are affected, by
landscape, the endgame of which we’ve only just started to understand that we can
destroy. The world is not a place of narrative—it doesn’t care about your stories anymore
than it cares about keeping everything that’s happened to it straight. So what did Pound
N
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 107
find? He found the world in its emergent, non-linear, non-linguistic form. And then he
took a vow of silence for ten years.
own went the ship. And those of us onboard went with it. When I started
this project, I had no concrete idea about what direction it would take me. I
was interested in the ways antiquity influenced fascism, and in turn
influenced Pound. I was inspired by the Chaos & Classicism exhibit at the Guggenheim
in New York, and knew almost immediately that I wanted to write about this segment of
history, an era in the arts mostly forgotten (in art history the study of many of the artists I
briefly touch on at the end, and the many more who were displayed the Guggenheim, has
only just begun). I was interested in, as Morrison titled the introductory chapter to his
Poetics of Fascism, “Modernism for the other people.” What I didn’t anticipate while I
spent the last year writing this paper was the extent to which the past, specifically the
1920’s and 1930’s, bears some resemblance to our own time, especially as extra-party
elements in the American political system like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street
movements have become daily presences in my life. My adviser Ben Stevens saw similar
connections and, more frequently than the essay reveals, those connections were a large
part of the discussion during our weekly meetings. The question for me was always how
to introduce these similarities (between, say, the coercive, nationalist rhetoric of the
fascists and the Tea Party) without reducing my analysis to an alarmist elision of two
very different political moments, one of which is ongoing. And yet, those ghost of one
time haunts my own in my mind: distinctions between “real” and “fake” Americans; the
rhetoric of violence that ultimately lead to the attempted assassination of Representative
Gabrielle Giffords; the numerous rallies against an imaginary “elite;” the appearance of a
D
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 108
foreign-born, “faceless left” in conservative discourse. This conversation, these fears, and
these prejudices both pre-date, overlap, and continue beyond my project, but throughout
the writing of this their presence was felt. The underlying question for me was always
what to say here, on these pages, if anything. Is it my ethical obligation to comment? Or
should I pass over it, either allowing the reader to observe the connections for his or
herself? And regarding Pound, the largest question throughout was how, as poet, does
one fit into the times? These are questions that I will continue to struggle with, and I can’t
say I have an answer yet or will by the time of my board or after. But they are for me the
ghosts that haunt my research, and every sentence of this project. And I can’t help but
feel that I am almost always extending my hand to them at every turn, only to find
they’ve turned away. I remain uncomfortable with the fact that they didn’t play a large
role in the first three chapters, but as my own feelings (and my own expectations) of the
outcomes of these movements, especially Occupy Wall Street, which I have invested
some of my own time in, I am not certain I am ready to comment on them. But I hope
that the connections, the rhymes between then and now, were obvious to my readers
while they read through this essay.
*
Letter 2
27 September 1955
Brooklyn
91. ALS-3
“Useful”? alwus comes down “to whom”? I’m probably irreclaimable you would say—
And I’ll agree—in respects. Ain’t in my nature to circulate tho heaven nose Id like to
unite others in friendship, taking Baruch [Spinoza] to heart on honesty etc.
Louis Zukofsky to Pound
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 109
Ezra,
LZ’s response to you gives me chills, because his respect for you came out of a deep
unwillingness to attack the problem at its source. Being a Jew, and a Jew who felt such a
profound love of your work, it was difficult (but not impossible) for LZ to reconcile
himself to your anti-Semitism. Whatever attempt you made, and other writers promoted,
to de-racialize your vocabulary’s racist bent so that a word like “kike” isn’t a racial
epithet but an economic category, I think it failed. I don’t believe it. The Jews, you wrote
in the letter to Zukofsky I quoted earlier (his response is the epigraph to this letter, as you
might remember), favor usefulness, operate always with a “utility reflex” in mind, by
which you mean only what is of value is the value of a thing to promote at the expense of
others. But Louis Zukofsky, and countless others, are the FACT that negates your racist
politics—LZ who made no money, who was ghettoized by the establishment (by those,
like Kenner, who spent their lives promoting your work) until Robert Creeley brought
him out of the dark. You can’t forget, Ezra, that fascism makes no sense now and did
then only because the sense it made was self-made, no basis in reality except in things
and their exchange as a system to not be capitalism. I salute the impulse to fight it, and
today, in the time of Occupy Wall Street, limited or not, perhaps umbrella’d by the Arab
Spring, this means a great deal to me. I only wish the causes you saw—greed and
warlust—were not based on the West’s stereotyped excuse for its own bad behavior, the
exotic Jew from the East come to fuck shit up. The people who charge unfair rates on the
exchange of monies, who take advantage the poor, and leverage politicians toward war,
are not a race (and therefore, as the history of the world has shown, destroyable), but a
class, one that has been a constant since antiquity. The solutions to the problem won’t be
IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 110
so easy to find or enact, and as you experienced, even in your wrongheadness, and as
OWS has experienced in the violent assault on the movement’s peaceful supporters in
Oakland, New York, and Atlanta, the one percent who benefit from the system at hand
will not relent in their will to preserve it ninety-nine percent of the time. Hard to stomach.
But nothing is permanent, and even the most powerful autocracy loses its ability to hold
on, and when the next takes its place, it is then that we can act to reform the ways things
are or unseat them before it’s too late, promote a cycle of leadership by which we might
all move in any direction we so choose, together at once. What do you think Pound? Does
the future tell us anything about ourselves, or does it always slip past us, just out of reach
to define itself as a potential we can never define? These are my questions. Write back
when you have the time.
XAIRE
XAIRE
XAIRE
XAIRE
XAIRE
XAIRE
XAIRE
XAIRE
Love,
Andrew
Durbin 111
V
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List of Figures
Fig. 1. Bertelli, Renato. Continuous Bust of Mussolini. 1933. Guggenheim. New York,
New York. Web. 25 November 2011.
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2011. <http://rt.com/news/russia-bans-mussolini/>
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Rome, Italy, late 1930s. Web. 25 November 2011.
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Fig. 7. Collage. Web. 25 November 2011.
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Fig. 9. Thayaht. Il Duce with Milestone. 1929. Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporenea
di Trento e Rovereto Photographed by Harald Schrader. Trento and Rovereto,
Italy. Web.
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/hsr/2587618735/>
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Fig. 11. Broken Angel. Arthur Wood. Photographed by Chris Wood. 2006. Web.
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